KIEPENKERL

"This liberating experience offered me as an artist the opportunity to go on and create my own objects in such bodies of work as Banality, where I did not work with direct readymade objects but created objects with a sense of readymade inherent in them".

In 1987 Jeff Koons was invited to participate for the first time in Skulptur Projekte Münster (Germany), a major art event held every 10 years. There he created his first installation in a public space, Kiepenkerl, based on a famous bronze statue by the same name that stood in a square in the heart of Munster and had strong historical and political connotations. Koons´s Kiepenkerl is the same size as the original but made of polished stainless steel, giving a popular sculpture a false appearance of luxury. In so doing, the artist brought the past up to date, using the same resources as in his previous two series. However, the difficulties involved in manufacturing this sculpture, which was damaged during the casting process and required major repairs, marked a turning point in Koons´s relationship with the readymade, as the Kiepenkerl experience freed him from the need to maintain his found objects intact, inviolate, and scrupulously unmodified.