Within 72 hours last week, Louis Vuitton previewed its Masters collection designed by Jeff Koons (which included a pop-up store in New York); Beverly Hills’s Gagosian Gallery opened its latest show featuring works from three series by the megawatt artist that all deal with metaphysics; and on April 29, he was also the guest of honor at MOCA’s annual gala, which drew Frank Gehry, Doug Aitken, Sterling Ruby, Sean Penn, and Pierce Brosnan, who introduced him to the well-heeled crowd in attendance. Though he is based in New York, Koons’s greatest concentration of work lives in L.A., and he concedes he’s “always thought it would be wonderful to live in Santa Monica Canyon, just in a simple bungalow.”
While it’s clear Koons is in the midst of a major moment, he’s reluctant to admit he’s in the spotlight. “All these things are like a continuation of everyday life,” he says. “I always enjoy making my work and trying to reach a higher level within my work.” And while his work seems all-encompassing, the artist says he’s made a concerted effort with his eight children so that “when they think of art they don’t think of their father or their mother, they think of other people—Dalí and Picasso and Manet and [Jean-Honoré] Fragonard.” To that end, his home is not a shrine to his own mesmerizing pieces, but to mostly 19th-century works, plus some modernism, Mannerist paintings, and contemporary artwork by the likes of David Salle and Richard Prince.
He’ll soon have even more space to show his collection, once his 67th Street Manhattan mega-manse—a combination of two large townhouses—is finished. “I’ve been working on this home for close to 10 years now,” says Koons, who says the process has taken so long because they had to start over: With the the first architects’ core and shell, "nothing was related to the rules of New York City.” The current guy on the job is AD100 architect Peter Pennoyer, who Koons says has been “a brilliant pleasure” to work with on the home, which has a beautiful Palladio facade and features a blend of contemporary and classic styles in the interior.
