SPORT AND BEYOND
On the occasion of the Paris Olympic Games, Almine Rech announces Sport and Beyond, a group exhibition featuring works by Jeff Koons, Laurie Simmons and Hank Willis Thomas.
June 27 - August 17, 2024
For this exhibition, Jeff Koons designed a new sculpture that forms an extension of his famous Gazing Balls series, inspired by the Borghese Gladiator in the Louvre (circa 110 BCE). The resulting artwork offers an anachronistic encounter between the ancient world and his ongoing series. The Gazing Balls glass spheres symbolise the cosmos from the 19th century, previously housed across palaces, (notably that of Ludwig II of Bavaria), and re-posited as decorative spheres in the 20th century in North-American gardens.
As the first work from the Gazing Ball series to feature several spheres – where earlier iterations had a single deep-blue sphere, Jeff Koons' Borghese Gladiator is made from a highly resistant synthetic plaster to which a whiter-than-marble resin, developed in-house, has been added.
In the artist’s newest works , Laurie Simmons begins with a series of text prompts, instructing artificial intelligence tools to compose new scenes that blend reality and fantasy. Her troupe of synchronised swimmers draw inspiration from an underwater archival scene from the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.
Her flower-capped adorned swimmers and whimsical ballet dancers reference her earlier photographic series Water Ballet and Strip Ins . Simmons’ work continues to feature dualities: doll/human, reality/fantasy, interior/exteriors and more. Embracing the possibilities and limitations of AI technology, Simmons ‘corrects’ the works using non-traditional photographic materials, becoming the seamstress/couturière/haberdasher of each canvas – using an application of swimming caps, bathing suits, and rhinestones.
With a background in photography, Thomas takes commercial advertising, and press clippings, reframing and refocusing their original contexts, Hank Willis Thomas has long been fascinated by Martin Luther King and the Harlem Renaissance cultural movement, whose philosophy, in the interwar years, championed nonviolent civil disobedience as a way of raising the moral and social status of African-Americans.
The sculpture Endless Column III (2017), forms a statuesque trophy on a plinth built up on a stack of fiberglass footballs that pays tribute to Brancusi's eponymous work. Painted with a “chameleon” body paint , its hues change according to the viewer's position and perspective.