Jeff Koons’ Puppy sculpture has graced the entrance of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao since 1997. Author: Jose María Ligero Loarte, This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
Jeff Koons
This year the Guggenheim Bilbao is celebrating its 25th anniversary. Jeff Koons' Puppy sculpture has graced the museum's entrance for twenty five years and has become one of the world's most beloved works of art.
The 43 foot high West Highland Terrier gets a new coat twice a year, in May and October. It's planted with colorful, seasonal flowers like petunias, marigolds, alyssum, impatiens and begonias, to recreate the colors of an English garden. In honor the museum's anniversary, Koons has decided to replant Puppy with white flowers.
It takes twenty people, working for nine days, to replant Puppy's coat with 23 tons of soil and 38,000 new flowers, which are kept alive with an internal irrigation system. The sculpture is anchored to a concrete base. An enormous stainless steel substructure is covered by a layer of turf, wire mesh, and geotextile fabric that secures the turf and stimulates plant growth. The sculpture also contains five levels of scaffolding and a network of pipes that water and feed the plants every 24 hours.
With Puppy planted firmly on the earth, Jeff Koons has set his sights outside of the stratosphere. He's arranged for some of his artworks to leave our planet and be placed on the moon. Each of Koons' physical sculptures will have a corresponding NFT. These artworks will make their landing on the moon's surface on an Intuitive Machines Nova-C Lunar Lander in a fully autonomous mission. The intended destination for the sculptures is in an area called Oceanus Procellarum, which is the largest of the moon's flat, dark plains of lower elevation that mark the moon's surface.
Jeff Koons: Moon Phases is a collaboration with the artist, Pace Gallery, Chantelle Baier of 4Space, a company involved with NASA and Intuitive Machines that designed the enclosed art cube in which the Koons' artwork will be placed. The specific works that are part of the project have not yet been revealed. The artwork is scheduled to take off from launchpad 39A at Kennedy Space Center sometime later this year.
Please contact us if you would like more information about the work of Jeff Koons, or any of the fine art available at Surovek Gallery.
References:
Eric James Beyer. Moon Phases: An Inside Look At The NFT Project That Will Land on the Moon. NFT Now. May 23, 2022.
Jeff Koons' New Project Will Land on the Moon. Cool Hunting. Link/Tech.
The Artful Life: 5 Things Galerie Editors Love This Week: Guggenheim Museum Bilbao's Puppy Gets a Whole New Look In Celebration of Museum's 25th Anniversary. Galerie Magazine. May 31, 2022.