Jeff Koons & Andy Warhol

Flowers provided Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons with a shared subject through which to examine beauty, repetition, artificiality, and popular desire. Warhol returned to floral imagery throughout his career, from early drawings and commercial illustrations to the serialized Flowers paintings and prints of the 1960s and later decades. By cropping, flattening, recoloring, and repeating photographic sources, he converted a conventional emblem of natural beauty into a highly mediated image. Koons approached the motif through sculpture, transforming flowers into polished, enlarged, and deliberately seductive objects whose materials and surfaces blur distinctions between nature and manufacture, innocence and luxury, sentiment and spectacle.

Published by Gagosian Gallery on the occasion of the 2002 New York exhibition Jeff Koons Andy Warhol Flowers, this catalogue places the two artists’ treatments of the motif in direct visual dialogue. Its unusual dos-à-dos structure presents the Warhol and Koons sections on inverted pages, emphasizing both their independence and their formal correspondence. The publication comprises two extensively illustrated sections of 52 and 56 pages, together with a separate sixteen-page booklet containing a text by Daniel Pinchbeck. Bringing together Warhol’s paintings, drawings, and prints with Koons’s predominantly sculptural interpretations, the volume offers a concentrated study of how two major artists used a familiar decorative subject to address reproduction, surface, cultural memory, and the transformation of ordinary imagery into contemporary icons.