Jeff Koons

Donkey (Purple) condenses the intensity of childhood pleasure into visual form, and belongs to the artist’s Easyfun series which was unveiled to great critical acclaim at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York in December 1999. Consisting of a sequence of collage paintings and monochrome mirrors based on the outlines of cartoon animals - in this case Eeyore from A. A. Milne’s Winnie The Pooh - the viewers saw reflections of themselves amidst a small group of paintings, transforming the gallery into a fantasy child’s room of sorts. The mirrors emphasize complete and total self-gratification, as well as a child's ever-wanting consumption of popular culture.

In Donkey (Purple), Koons pushes the viewer beyond the bounds of preconceived notions of taste and culture to create something visually appealing in its own right. “I’ve tried to make work that any viewer, no matter where they came from, would have to respond to, would have to say on some level, ‘Yes, I like it.’ If they couldn’t do that it would only be because they had been told they were not supposed to like it. Eventually they will be able to strip all that down and say, ‘You know, it’s silly, but I like that piece. It’s great.” (Jeff Koons quoted in: The Jeff Koons Handbook, New York, 1992, p. 112)