Bourgeois Bust- Jeff and Ilona

<p>Jeff Koons originally made this work for his now notorious <em>Made in Heaven</em> exhibition, in which he explored concepts of love by referencing his own marriage to Italian porn star Ilona Staller. He explains, “With <em>Bourgeois Bust</em>, I wanted . . . to be able to bring Ilona’s body and my body down together in a point so that it’s a heart—a symbol of love—and take the flesh and cut through it to form it that way without any sense of violence.” Here the couple appears within a traditional Baroquestyle portrait bust like those of 18th-century sculptor Antonio Canova (whose work you can see in the museum’s galleries of European painting and sculpture). <em>Bourgeois Bust</em> sets in tension the elegance of neoclassical sculpture and the irreverence of deploying its idealized terms in the postmodern era.</p>