The Whitney Museum of American Art is exhibiting a retrospective of Jeff Koon’s work.

Comprising almost 150 objects dating from 1978 to the present, this exhibition will be the most comprehensive ever devoted to the artist’s groundbreaking oeuvre. By reconstituting all of his most iconic works and significant series in a chronological narrative, the retrospective will allow visitors to understand Koons’s remarkably diverse output as a multifaceted whole.

-Whitney Museum

Gilsanz Murray Steficek has previously collaborated with Jeff Koon’s on his Puppy and Train installations.

In “Puppy”, Koons engages both past and present, employing sophisticated computer modeling while referencing the 18th-century formal garden. A behemoth West Highland terrier carpeted in bedding plants, “Puppy” combines the most saccharine of iconography—flowers and puppies—in a monument to the sentimental.

-Guggenheim Musuem

The 43-foot-tall structure supports 70,000 flowering plants. Originally installed at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the installation was reconstructed at Rockefeller Center in the summer of 2000. GMS prepared an installation manual for this unique sculpture, including suggestions for alterations to the structure, which aid in future installations. The fact that the assembled pieces are so large required that care be taken to avoid harm to people, property and the structure itself.

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The base is assembled from paws to tail using galvanized bolts and washers
and a lubricant with corrosion inhibitor.

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The second tier is added and aligned.

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The Puppy is raised and repositioned.

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Puppy’s inner workings: irrigation plumbing is installed.

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Planted Puppy

The Rockefeller site currently houses Jeff Koon’s similar monumental topiary entitled “Split-Rocker”.

GMS also provided feasibility consulting services to the artist’s studio for his “Train” sculpture, a full-size replica of a 1943 Baldwin 2900 steam locomotive weighing several tons, intended to be suspended dramatically from a crane over New York City’s High-Line. The 70-foot sculpture would also spin its wheels, blow a horn and emit steam.

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