JUSTINE KOONS: MYTH
Salon 94 is pleased to present MYTH, Justine Koons’ first-ever solo exhibition of ceramic sculpture.
February 19 – March 29, 2025
Justine Koons has been reticent, judicious. It does a disservice to the complexity of her absence to call her shy. She is not emerging; she has not been blissfully gestating like Botticelli’s Venus. Instead, she has gone her own way. She has been getting ready, and now more than ever we must embolden those who have yet to be heard. It’s time. Salon 94 founder Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn narrates the first chapter: “We are curious. What has Justine Koons made? The self-contained wife and partner to Jeff Koons, and consumed mother of six (almost adult) children, has a secreted vibrant studio practice. For years there were whispers of clay sculpture. I felt my temperature rise from a shared picture—finally, of a blue torso of Venus—irresistibly covered in carved replicas of toys, shaped cookies, and beads. Here is where our story starts…”
In the summer of 1995, Justine Wheeler left her native Johannesburg for a vacation in the States. An art school graduate and curator—she organized an exhibition of iconic artists like Kara Walker, Cecily Brown, and Lisa Brice in 2000—she used the opportunity to make and look at art. In a method reminiscent of Barbara Kruger’s Picture/Readings series (1978), she photographed the exteriors of homes and the objects folks displayed in their yards. Everything was in flux: the art world was mounting challenging debates about identity while the wider culture, as examined in Susan Faludi’s Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women (1991), left activists wondering, as they would soon wonder again, how to preserve their hard-won gains. That fall, she met her soon-to-be husband Jeff Koons and, to quote David Lynch, started “the art life.”
Like Warhol, Koons is reticent, and we might demand answers. The only answer Koons might supply is permission to rifle through it all without any explanation, offering this: “The layering of these pieces contributes to what I think of as a personal archaeology, a journey to uncover what lies within, hidden beneath the mass of accumulated experiences.” Myths, both personal and cultural, give shape to those accumulated experiences. As retold by Koons, they are always emerging, evolving, disappearing, only to jump back into the cultural consciousness once again.
Justine Koons’s Kunstkabinett recognizes the messy nature of myth, an inherent game of telephone played across time and culture. For Justine Koons, reticence is an invitation. “I prefer if people create their own myth rather than revealing too much of myself.” Yet she is undoubtedly a part of the myth—not underneath it, but within it. Justine Koons is a mythmaker.