Jeff Koons: "Venus" Lespugue
The Museum of Cycladic Art shows Jeff Koons's Balloon Venus Lespugue (Orange) for the first time in public, at the Stathatos Mansion in Kolonaki, alongside certified copies of ten Upper Palaeolithic Venus figurines; the exhibition runs from 20 March to 28 September 2026.
Jeff Koons: “Venus” Lespugue is a single-work exhibition at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens, held in the Stathatos Mansion from 20 March to 28 September 2026. It marks the first public showing of Balloon Venus Lespugue (Orange), a monumental mirror-polished stainless steel sculpture Koons made between 2013 and 2019.
The sculpture is shown alongside certified copies of ten Venus figurines of the Upper Palaeolithic, drawn from European collections including Paris, Vienna and Rome. The Venus of Lespugue itself, the figure Koons’s work takes as its subject, was cut from tusk ivory some 25,000 years ago and found in the Rideaux cave at Lespugue in the Haute-Garonne in 1922; it is held at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. Panagiotis P. Iossif and Ioannis D. Fappas are the curators and academic directors of the exhibition.
The museum’s argument is set out in the pairing itself: one female form carried across forty thousand years, and what the change of material from mammoth ivory and limestone to mirror-finished steel does to its meaning. The exhibition is shown in the Stathatos Mansion, the wing the Museum of Cycladic Art uses for its loan exhibitions, at Kolonaki in central Athens.