Gagosian Featured Work by Jeff Koons at Frieze New York 2025
JEFF KOONS Frieze New York, 2025, installation view Artwork © Jeff Koons, Incredible Hulk ™, and © Marvel. All rights reserved. Photo: Maris Hutchinson Courtesy Gagosian
“Hulk Elvis represents for me both Western and Eastern cultures, a sense of a guardian, a protector, that at the same time is capable of bringing the house down. I have tried to blend these cultural histories together. The Hulk represents a duality that shifts from a superhero to a divine being.”
NEW YORK,—Gagosian presented a solo presentation of works by Jeff Koons at Frieze New York 2025, nearly twenty-five years since the first collaboration between the artist and the gallery. Three sculptures—Hulk (Organ) (2004–14), Hulk (Tubas) (2004–18), and Hulk (Dragon and Turtle) (2004–21), all from the Hulk Elvis series—are on view against a specially produced immersive vinyl backdrop. All the sculptures are from Koons’s own collection, and the artist participated in every stage of the exhibition process, from the initial selection to the design of the booth and the layout of the installation.
JEFF KOONS Frieze New York, 2025, installation view Artwork © Jeff Koons, Incredible Hulk ™, and © Marvel. All rights reserved. Photo: Maris Hutchinson Courtesy Gagosian
Drawing on sources including figures from classical antiquity, everyday objects, and contemporary icons, Koons explores the conjunction of the readymade and the sublime in lavishly realized artifacts and tableaux. Identifying commonalities throughout cultural history, he confronts fundamental as- pects of the human psyche by working through such unifying concepts as the new, the banal, and the sublime. Koons continues to produce highly polished—but nonetheless accessible—objects andim-ages that exude beauty, sexuality, spirituality, and even happiness.
JEFF KOONS Hulk (Tubas), 2004-2018 Polychromed bronze and brass 97 1/4 x 82 3/4 x 48 1/8 inches Edition of 3 + AP © Jeff Koons, Incredible Hulk ™, and © Marvel. All rights reserved. Photo: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO studio Courtesy Palazzo Strozzi and Gagosian
The polychrome bronze and mixed-media sculptures at Frieze New York pair the Incredible Hulk su- perhero with a variety of collaged objects. The works’ surfaces mimic the gloss of vinyl inflatables— forms with which Koons has worked since his early career, pairing their distinctive qualities with those of bronze since Aqualung from the Equilibrium series (1985). Hulk (Dragon and Turtle) finds the superhero merged with two pool toys styled after cartoon animals. Hulk (Organ), a functioning organ incorporating keys, pipes, and a pedalboard that extend from the towering figure’s upper body, legs, and shoulders, features a sound element. Hulk (Tubas) has a musical component too, multiple brass bells of the titular horn surrounding the figure’s head and torso. As their titles suggest, these two works both double as functioning instruments capable of intense volume.
JEFF KOONS Frieze New York, 2025, installation view Artwork © Jeff Koons, Incredible Hulk ™, and © Marvel. All rights reserved. Photo: Maris Hutchinson Courtesy Gagosian
For Koons, the Hulk embodies both a current in Western popular culture and the Eastern figure of the “guardian god.” Endowed with protective abilities, the character’s capacity for violence also renders him a fundamentally human animal. Philip Tinari, writing in the catalogue for Hulk Elvis at Gagosian Hong Kong (2014), observes that the Hulk first appeared in 1962, and was thus “a creature of the Cold War and of Camelot.” In these works, its wide-legged stance also refers to that of Elvis in Andy War-hol’s images of the iconic rock ’n’ roller. By now, however, Bruce Banner’s alter ego has largely shed such national and cultural associations, coming to symbolize instead something primordial and uni-versal. Finally, Koons’s painting Triple Hulk Elvis III (2007), which incorporates the superhero’s form alongside other elements including a partial image of foundational rock band Led Zeppelin, is repro-duced along with fragmented details on the booth’s vinyl backdrop. For Jeff Koons’s biographical information and exhibition history, please visit here.
For more information about Frieze New York, please visit their website here and find them on Facebook, Instagram, and X.. Gagosian booth was located at The Shed, New York | Booth B5. For more information about the artists represented by Gagosian and other exhibitions at the gallery, please visit the gallery’s site here. The gallery can also be found on Pinterest, X, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Artsy.
