Gagosian Gallery, New York
Dakis Joannou, Athens

New York, Gagosian Gallery, Jeff Koons, March - May 2001
Athens, DESTE Foundation, Monument to Now, The Dakis Joannou Collection, June - December 2004, p.242, illustrated in color

This work is in excellent condition overall. There are no apparent condition problems with this work. Under Ultra Violet there are no apparent restorations to this work. This work is unframed.
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In Pancakes, 2001, Jeff Koons magnificently juxtaposes familiar yet unrelated elements in a meticulously hand painted collage of visual popular culture.  With this painting Koons successfully combines high and low culture with infectious vibrant energy.  From his series Easyfun Ethereal, the present work represents a fusing of spacial layers.  For this series Koons sourced images from glossy magazines and personal photographs and then used the computer to combine these images in a deliriously optimistic reshuffle, shifting both context and scale.  Following the computer manipulation, these images are then transferred back to the traditional medium of oil painting with photorealistic perfection.  This series is made of surprising and complex layers of meaning, including the theme that permeates Koons' oeuvre: a seductive consumerist aesthetic that parallels contemporary advertising and media.  Pancakes, and the Easyfun Ethereal series as a whole, launched K💮oons back into theꦇ center of the art world fray.

In his early work Koons sought to remove sexuality.  The Hoover series, although having suggestions of a male/female element, was not overtly sexual.  The vacuums were used more as living and breathing machines that were symbolic ready-mades of consumerism, particularly female consumerism.  The Equilibrium series was a counterbalance to this as it was appropriated from a more male consumerist idea.  Luxury and Degradation was a series in which Koons urged viewers not to give up the pursuit of luxury and to maintain the status of economic power.  In Made in Heaven, Koons explored and embraced the culture of the past, particularly the Romanticism of the Baroque and Rococo.  Koons maintained his interest in these periods in his Easyfun Ethereal series.  In his essay "Dream Machine", Robert Rosenblum comments on this interest, "in surprising ways, the intricate, gravity-defiant asymmetries of many of Koons's restlessly curving shapes - the curls of a salad green, the undulant contours of breeze-blown hair - revive the language of the most spectacularly ornate manifestations of the German Baroque and Rococo art, a style that has been whimsically, but usefully, referred to as `barococo'.  This gorgeous corner of art history has offered constant inspiration for Koons." (Exh. Cat., Berlin, Guggenheim, Easyfun-Ethereal, 2001, p.49-51.)

The Easyfun Ethereal series began with Cut-Out of 1999.  This was the first picture in which Koons truly honed the use of his multi-layered collage imagery, exploring his new super-pop Baroque aesthetic.  The collaged, disconnected images and high-key colors that comprise Pancakes are a metaphor for the bombarding stimuli of modern life.  In this way, Koons can be compared to James Rosenquist.  In the present work and other works from the Easyfun Ethereal series, Koons references Rosenquist's signature style of rendering everyday objects with the immediacy and gigantism of billboard advertising, yet thwarting their complete apprehension through fragmentation, shifts in scale and odd juxtapositions.  Rosenquist also used photographic sources drawn from magazines, newspapers and posters.  B𒊎oth artists capture modern life as lived and reflected thrꦅough the media and create large-scale works that blur the distinction between painting, sculpture and environment.

The collection of images in the present work appeals to the viewer's senses.  The pancakes and peas invoke our sense of smell and taste, the hands- touch, and the landscape-sight and sound.  The images also invoke a luscious sensuality.  The disembodied hands grasp the foot and at the top of the composition we see just the hands and stomach of a woman suggestively caressing herself, the destination of her hands left to the viewer's imagination hidden by the pristine landscape of the pond and shoreline.  The landscape provides a subliminal foundation to the dream images, rooting them to earth.  The final element of the painting is the hair without a head, floating above the hand.  It is unclear if this is a man or woman but seems likely it is a faceless man.  The random association between food, landscape, and sex recalls both childish and adult associations of pleasure, thought and sight.  Koons stated, "You know, all of life is....just about being able to find amazement in things.  I think it's easy for people to feel connected to that situation of not tiring of looking at something over and over again, and not feeling any sense of boredom, but feeling interest.  Life is amazing, and visual experience is amazing." (David Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists, London, 2002, p. 334)  The intense and almost hallucinatory atmosphere in th✅is painting is the conjoining of the world of computer imagery and t💫he weighty tradition of oil painting as Koons both looks towards the future and keeps a strong hold on the past.