Major moves for one of the most celebrated contemporary artists: indeed, Jeff Koons is returning to be represented by the Gagosian gallery after a four-year hiatus. His return to the Los Angeles merchant’s team marks a significant moment in the contemporary art scene. It was Larry Gagosian’s own gallery that officially announced the new beginning of a collaboration that had been discontinued in 2021. This resumption represents something of a “homecoming” for Koons, the most expensive living artist ever sold at auction. The representation with Gagosian, which restarted on Aug. 27, 2025, according to the gallery’s official statement, ends a four-year adventure with Pace Gallery.
The bond between Jeff Koons and Gagosian has deep roots. Over a span of more than two decades, the gallery has dedicated thirteen solo exhibitions to the artist in venues in Beverly Hills, Hong Kong, London, and New York, exploring and presenting key series such as Celebration (1994-2019), Easyfun-Ethereal (2000-02), Popeye (2002-13), Hybrid (2003-13), Hulk Elvis (2004-), Antiquity (2008-) and Gazing Ball (2012-). The culmination of the collaboration was probably the monumental installation Split-Rocker (2000) presented at Rockefeller Center in 2014, a gigantic work covered with more than fifty thousand flowering plants, made at the same time as the major retrospective.
The return comes amid a market environment in which attention to Koons’ works remains high, but there is no shortage of signs of caution from collectors. During the May 2025 Frieze New York fair, reports U.S. media outlet Artnet News, Gagosian exhibited a number of sculptures from the Hulk Elvis series, selling at least one piece titled Hulk (Tubas), dated 2004-18, for an estimated price of around $3 million. At the same time, Koons’s overall auction sales declined significantly: from $111 million in 2019 to $29.8 million in 2024. In any case, the artistic context in which this new phase opens sees Koons increasingly at the center of a confrontation between historical art, mass culture, and spectacle. Gagosian’s official announcement describes him as an artist capable of challenging the boundaries between popular culture, art history, and contemporary vision. This ability of his to combine classical references, everyday objects and aesthetic sublimation is also confirmed in his vast production: from the sacred transposition of the ancient in the Antiquity and Gazing Ball series, to the monumental sculptures in chrome-plated steel in the Celebration or Balloon Dog series. Koons’ effectiveness-and his persistence in the art scene-also lies in his orchestrated use of technology and craftsmanship. Moreover, the artist recently stated, in an interview with the Guardian, his reluctance to leverage creative artificial intelligences: he uses them only as tools to explore material variations, not as autonomous agents of creation: a clear line in defense of manual dexterity and human sensory priming.
In this new phase with Gagosian, Koons thus seems to want to reassert his position as an icon of pop-contemporary art. It is a return laden with memory and expectation: the collaboration promises new exhibitions, perhaps new chapters in the historical series, and, who knows, perhaps even the emergence of new unprecedented creative challenges. So Gagosian and Jeff Koons are walking back together: the stage is set for witnessing a new chapter in one of the longest-running and most successful dialogues in contemporary art.
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| Gagosian announces return of Jeff Koons: new chapter for iconic contemporary artist |
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