Sonnabend Gallery, New York
Acquired꧒ by the present owner from the above in January 2001

Bregenz, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Jeff Koons, July – September 2001, p. 94, illustrated in color and illustrated in color on the back cover (detail)
Bielefeld, Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Jeff Koons. Pictures 1980 - 2002, September - November 🎐2002, p. 89, illustrated in color

Hans Werner Holzwarth ed., Jeff Koons, Cologne, 2007, p. 481, illustrated in color
Leslie Camhi, "The Seer - Ileana Sonnabend", New York Times Style Magazine, December 2, 2007, p. 209, illustrated in color (with the artist, Ileana Sonnabend and Antonio Homem)

This painting is in excellent condition. Please contact the department for the condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. The canvas is unframed.
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Jeff Koons' ability to create contemporary objects of desire that are seductively bizarre and deeply coveted is clearly evident in Cheeky, 2000, from the seminal series Easyfun-Ethereal.  With his earlier career-making series Banality, Koons acknowledged the increasingly prominent role that advertising and popular imagery played in artist's careers.  Twelve years later in Easyfun-Ethereal, Koons was still deeply engaged by a seductive consumerist aesthetic that paralleled contemporary advertising and media.  In the present work, Koons invokes luscious sexuality executed to the standards of Renaissance masters by his studio of artisans and assistants from whom he demands utter perfection.  There is always a lingering question of irony versus sincerity; what is the intent of the artist?  Is he serious or is there an element of mockery?  There is a sense that the matter could go either way; hence, both the appeal and uproar generated by his work.  Cheeky is an outstanding example of Koons' satirical commentary on late twentieth century society and represents the technical excellence, common subject matter, and debatable intentꦜ of the artist.

In Koons' painting Cheeky, the viewer is confronted with collaged, disconnected images and high-key colors that are executed with photorealistic perfection. It is a puzzling image, bizarre in its collage of kitsch and the everyday with a certain Rococo flair for exacting precision.  The images in Cheeky are a metaphor for the bombarding stimuli of modern life.  In this work, Koons references James Rosenquist's signature style begun in the 1960s Pop art milieu in which everyday objects are rendered with the immediacy and gigantism of billboard advertising. Yet Koons thwarts their compl🌳ete apprehension through fragmentation, shifts in scale and odd juxtapositions.  The intense and almost hallucinatory atmosphere in this painting is the conjoining of the world of computer imagery and the weighty tradition of oil painting as Koons both looks towards the future and keeps a strong hold on the past.

For paintings in this series, Koons sourced images from glossy magazines and personal photographs and then used the computer to combine them in a deliriously optimistic reshuffle, shifting both context and scale.  There are surprising and complex layers of meaning here, including the temptations of consumerist products and everyday consumerist objects.  In an interview with David Sylvester, Koons states, "I love Pop art, and I really want to play with aspects of Pop.  So much of the world is advertising, and because of that, individuals feel that they have to present themselves as a package." (Exh. Cat., Berlin, Deutsche Guggenheim, Easyfun-Ethereal, 2000, p. 18)  The random association between food, landscape and sex recalls both childish and adult associations of pleasure, thought, taste and sight.  The grilled cheese sandwich oozing with processed cheese is a much loved food of childhood now turned into a lusciouslꩲy suggestive sexual object hovering over the pink leather bikini and the surprisingly serene landscape.  Like the earliest paintings from this series, the present work plays with the idea of the cut-out. Koons eliminates human forms but successfully alludes to them by placing objects in recognizable human poses.  The viewer immediately senses the missing female posterior and legs from the lace underwear floating in the foreground and understands the subtlety of the sexual pose without the body. There is an additional reference to a second female in the empty pink bathing suit, again suggestive of nubile bodies basking in the bright sun on a beach. The landscape provides a subliminal foundation to the dream images, rooting them to earth.  The other common element in works from this series is the hair without a head, in this case, clearly female, and gently falling across the composition in at once a seductive and unsettling fashion.

The pain-staking efforts to master traditional materials in unprecedented scale and therefore complexity have set Koons apart from his immediate art-historical ancestors.  Koons is concerned with the transformation of everyday objects into art and takes issue with such post-modern notions as high and low culture, context, and commoditization of art.  With both of these works Jeff Koons successfully combines high and low culture with infectious vibrant energy.  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 title of the present work, Cheeky, is a perfect Koonsian choice - a play on words that can be understood or misunderstood in two ways.  At first the title seems to refer to the ridiculous and humorous combination of insolently bold imagery.  The second reading is literally of the missing "cheeks" from the women's underwear.  This ambiguity is what makes Koons' works so appealing to the viewer – is it sexual or childish, is it easy fun or is it ethereal?  Should it make us laugh or feel uncomfortable?  The success of the works from the Easyfun-Ethereal series comes from their ability to elicit all of these emotions while using familiar images that capture modern life as lived and reflected through the🤪 media to blu𒁃r the distinction between painting, sculpture and environment.