As part of the opening events of Appearance Stripped Bare: Desire and the Object in the work of Marcel Duchamp and Jeff Koons, Even, Jeff Koons and Massimiliano Gioni, Curator of the exhibition, will be in conversation. There will also be a series of talks with Calvin Tomkins, Francis Naumann, Linda Yablonksy, Jeffrey Deitch, María Minera and Julieta González, which will explore the possible connections that link these two artists.

PROGRAM
10:30AM
Introduction by Massimiliano Gioni

10:45AM – 11:30AM
Linda Yablonsky and Jeffrey Deitch, moderated by Julieta González

11:35AM – 12:20PM
Calvin Tomkins and Massimiliano Gioni

12:20PM – 12:30PM
Break

12:30PM – 1:10PM
Francis Naumann and María Minera

1:15PM – 2:15PM
Jeff Koons and Massimiliano Gioni

Jeffrey Deitch’s dialogue with Jeff Koons began in 1980. They have created many projects together. Exhibitions that Deitch has curated, from Post Human in 1992 to People in 2019 have featured major works by Jeff Koons. Deitch helped to build several of the most important collections of Koon’s work, and helped to produce the artist’s influential Celebration series. He contributed an essay on Koons’s childhood and his development as an artist for the Whitney Museum retrospective catalogue.

Massimiliano Gioni is Edlis Neeson Artistic Director of the New Museum in New York, and the director of the Trussardi Foundation in Milan. Gioni has organized numerous international exhibitions including the 55th Venice Biennale (2013), the Gwangju Biennale (2010), the Berlin Biennale (2006), and Manifesta (2004). At the New Museum he has curated many group exhibitions including After Nature (2008), Ghosts in the Machine (2012), Here and Elsewhere (2014), and The Keeper (2016), along with solo shows by, among others, John Akomfrah, Pawel Althamer, Thomas Bayrle, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Tacita Dean, Nicole Eisenman, Urs Fischer, Camille Henrot, Carsten Höller, Sarah Lucas, Albert Oehlen, Chris Ofili, Pipilotti Rist, and Anri Sala.

Julieta González is Artistic Director at the Museo Jumex, Mexico City. Previously, she was Adjunct Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Senior Curator at the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, and Adjunct Curator at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, in New York. Between 2009 and 2012 she was Associate Curator of Latin American Art at Tate Modern. She has published essays in exhibition catalogues and periodical publications including Afterall, The Exhibitionist, Flash Art, and Parkett.

María Minera is a Mexico City–based independent scholar and art critic. She has contributed catalogue essays on a range of contemporary artists and has also written on twentieth-century art and culture in Mexico. Her noteworthy scholarship on Octavio Paz’s relationship to Surrealism is included in the exhibition catalogue for the 2014 exhibition En esto ver aquello: Octavio Paz y el arte, held at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City.

Francis Naumann is a New York–based scholar specializing in Duchamp and New York Dada. He is the author of countless essays and multiple books on the French artist, including The Duchamp Family of Artists (2014); The Recurrent, Haunting Ghost: Essays on the Art, Life and Legacy of Marcel Duchamp (2012); Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess (2009); and Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1999). He is also the coeditor of Affectionately, Marcel: The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp (2000) and Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century (1989).

Calvin Tomkins has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1960 and is author of more than a dozen books, including many on Duchamp, such as The World of Marcel Duchamp (1966), The Bride and the Bachelors (1976), his authoritative Duchamp: A Biography (1996/2014), and Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews (2013). His essays on Duchamp can be found in countless exhibition catalogues, including the recent Dancing around the Bride (2013) and Marcel Duchamp (2015). His writings on Koons are included in Post- to Neo- (1988) and Lives of the Artists (2008).

Linda Yablonsky is a critic and journalist who has been writing about contemporary art and artists around the world for more than twenty-five years. Based in New York, she is the author of The Story of Junk: A Novel, and of a forthcoming biography about Jeff Koons, the first book to take full account of his life and career.