I’m going to start by saying I am relatively new to the city of London, that is, I started working here quite recently. Being immediately hit by the enormously fast-paced nature of literally everything in the city, I adopted a ‘say yes to…everything’ attitude. This mind-set has seen me turn up at a designers’ BBQ wedged between two closely spaced city walls, gazing across the city over a few bevvies up the Shard and having a picnic of risotto on the banks of the Thames within the first week, to name a few.
As is the style with last minute plans, I was offered, at the last minute, to see the Jeff Koons exhibit with a couple of friends this past week (it being the closing days). And…here we are.
Following is a collection of pictures I took of the exhibit in roughly the order I experienced them, omitting any images from ‘room three’, which were prohibited due to what turned out to be somewhat graphic images of…the birds and the bees.
I wasn’t hugely clued up on the works of Jeffy K, having only been vaguely aware of the sale of his Balloon Dog (orange) which, after a quick google turns out was sold at a record £58,505,000, the highest price fetched (pun intended) for the work of a living artist.
I successfully identified the following balloon animal after I was asked a good 5 times by doubting faces. Have a look and guess, I’ll let you know at the end of this post.
I loved these very Monopoly-piece-esque iterations of busts and transport.
Things got a little more surreal in the next room, with three Spalding basket balls floating in Jeff’s old fish tank. The room was also populated with various blow-up pool floats hanging as is seen here, or wedged between or placed on plastic pool-side chairs. I didn’t ask, though in retrospect, I wish I had!
Finally we had a few more balloon animals, but more in the style of the ones you pluck from a cloud of another 50 being held by a fairground employee. The last room also had my favourite piece of the exhibit, the ‘big pile of Playdough’, which put me in mind of that scene in Jurassic park where they suddenly hear the satellite phone and have to retrieve it from a similar looking, though less colourful, mound.
(It was a Monkey)