Suburbia, pop culture, and classical figures come together in Jeff Koons show at David Zwirner (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

“Gazing Ball,” David Zwirner, 525 West 19th St., free, through June 29, 212-727-2070
“New Paintings and Sculpture,” Gagosian Gallery, 555 West 24th St., free, through July 3, 212-741-1111
www.jeffkoons.com

Former commodities broker Jeff Koons has been surrounded by controversy his entire artistic career, in both his personal and professional life. While his exhibitions break attendance records and his work sells for astronomical sums at auction, the critics lambast him as derivative, mundane, and banal. He even slyly titled one of his series “Banality,” despite criticism that both the New York City-based artist and his fabrication output lack any kind of real depth. But all of that is merely meta to the work itself, which is steeped in art history, pop culture, and the fantasy world of comic books and is often, though certainly not always, fun and playful to experience. Koons currently has a pair of Chelsea shows, including his first solo New York exhibition of new work in ten years, the world premiere of “Gazing Ball.” Incorporating classical forms into a middle-class environment, Koons has created a series of white sculptures, each of which contains a blue sphere, a mirrored “gazing ball” of blown glass that the artist used to see outside homes in the York, Pennsylvania, neighborhood where he grew up. Instead of on green lawns, the sculptures, which range from plaster depictions of Apollo Lykeios, Crouching Venus, the Farnese Hercules, and Diana to a row of mailboxes, a birdbath, and a snowman, are liberally arranged through a winding maze of blindingly white rooms at David Zwirner’s massive Nineteenth St. space. The shockingly blue gazing balls help make the meticulously crafted statues come alive, as if they are visible beating hearts, even though they are placed on shoulders, arms, legs, and heads, while equating classical Greek and Roman figures with items that represent middle-class suburbia. Despite having an inherently silly quality to it, the show has a repetition and scale that quickly becomes enchanting if one lets it.

Gagosian exhibit features a wide range of Jeff Koons’s oeuvre (photo by Rob McKeever)

At Gagosian’s Twenty-Fourth St. gallery, “New Paintings and Sculpture” deals with many of the same themes as the works at David Zwirner, although it is much more of a hodgepodge of pieces from the last ten years. The “Antiquity” series consists of large-scale paintings of classical sculptures and works by Pablo Picasso and Louis Eilshemius over which Koons has added childlike doodles and, in one case, a sexily clad Bettie Page kissing a blow-up monkey while riding through the air on a dolphin, in addition to a pair of strikingly monochromatic, reflective, balloonlike sculptures of Venus of Willendorf and the Callipygian Venus (of the round buttocks). In another room, an inflatable Hulk pushes a flower cart and a large toy gorilla beats its chest, while an immense third space boasts three of Koons’s trademark huge balloon animals, a blue swan, a red monkey, and a yellow rabbit, recalling his 2008 outdoor Met exhibit, “Jeff Koons on the Roof.” Whether one considers Koons to still basically be a commodities broker or the second coming of Andy Warhol — he probably falls somewhere in between the two, which might not necessarily be all that different these days — it is hard not to get a kick out of both of these shows, especially the Zwirner display, which casts a mirror on contemporary society that not everyone likes to see.