Jeff Koons’s reworking of Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss will go on display next to the original painting in the Belvedere Museum in Vienna this summer. Entitled Gazing Ball (Klimt Kiss), Koons’s version is a near exact copy of the original, painted by his studio assistants, with a large blue glass ball attached to the front of the canvas. Speaking at a conference in Qatar last month, Koons said he was “thrilled” his 2015 work would be seen side by side with the 1907-08 original. A spokeswoman for the Austrian museum said details of the display, including its dates, would be finalised in May. Koons has made 35 Gazing Ball paintings based on masterpieces by Leonardo, Manet, Rubens, Titian and others. When the series was first shown at the Gagosian Gallery in New York in November 2015, the artist told reporters that his addition of a glass sphere was an improvement on the originals. “These paintings are stronger for being together with the gazing ball—if you removed the gazing ball they don’t have the same power, they don’t have the same phenomenology.”
