'Balloon Venus (Magenta), ' 2008–12. (© Jeff Koons/Gagosian Gallery)

Jeff Koons’s two-gallery blowout, his first large-scale appearance in commercial galleries in the city in 10 years and the unrivaled event of the spring art season (barring, perhaps, the Frieze Art Fair), is a roaring success, filled with feats of engineering and artistic choices that are as gleefully peculiar and perverse as any he has ever made. Mr. Koons strives to please, and he delivers.

Both shows are mostly made up of fairly large to gargantuan sculptures. At Gagosian, a threatening, man-size Incredible Hulk pushes a wheelbarrow filled with real flowers, all of them in full bloom. The Hulk appears to be made of thin plastic—a cheap inflatable toy writ large—but in fact, in a signature Koons trompe l’oeil, it is an immaculate bronze cast. Huge new stainless steel balloon sculptures are characteristically grandiose and dripping with sexual innuendo: a red monkey with a phallically sloping tail, a blue swan with a twist of material that resembles a rectum, and a magenta Venus of Willendorf that was modeled on the circa 24,000 B.C. sculpture of that name and flaunts numerous voluptuous curves.

'Antiquity 3,' 2009–11. (© Jeff Koons/Gagosian Gallery)

Viewing these sculptures can be a queasy experience: even while reveling in Mr. Koons’s delirious visual splendor, one is confronted with the dubious values that undergird it. This is art about the relentless pursuit of perfection and control, seven-plus-figure luxury goods pitched to billionaires and realized with massive sums of capital and labor. They embody and promote a determined lust for accumulation—a drive for money, sex, fame and historical stature. These sculptures’ sheer audacity and expense are, inextricably, ingredients in their production.

And these new pieces are even more audacious and expensive-looking than past Koons efforts. Even his paintings, long his Achilles’ heel, stun. Meticulously painted by teams of assistants, they’re fantastical, flat collages of works by artists including Picasso and Louis Eilshemius, as well as anonymous abstractions and photographs of ancient statuary, 1950s fetish pinup Bettie Page and various inflatable toys. Each has a cartoon sketch on top that resembles both a sailboat and a vagina. By the logic of that second image, and Mr. Koons’s flair for sexual imagery in general, viewers’ eyes penetrate the image, plunging into his strange elixirs of art history and sensuality.

Detail of 'Gazing Ball (Ariadne),' 2013. (© Jeff Koons/David Zwirner)

The pieces at Zwirner are comparatively austere white plaster sculptures modeled on ancient art (a reclining lady, a hulking nude man) and quotidian American culture (a long row of mailboxes, a birdbath), each with a reflective royal blue gazing ball perched on some part of it. The reflective balls, familiar from prototypical American front yards, take in and reflect the entire gallery. Mr. Koons’s best work tends to be his most ostentatious, his priciest, so these (relatively) modest pieces seem to run the risk of being consigned to the status of minor side projects. (Mr. Koons’s museum-filling Whitney Museum exhibition is scheduled to open next year, and the question of what will or won’t make the cut plays around these two shows.) But that would be a mistake, since they seem to evince a newfound interest in process (plaster often being used to make copies of sculptures or as an intermediary material in their creation) and experimentation (some are damaged in sections or missing limbs, though they are otherwise smooth).

'Metallic Venus,' 2010–12. (© Jeff Koons/Gagosian Gallery)

Another intriguing outlier is a turquoise sculpture at Gagosian based on the ancient Greco-Roman Callipygian Venus—the Venus of the beautiful buttocks. It has an exaggeratedly smooth shape in some sections—note the toeless feet—that create warped reflections. If it weren’t for the real white flowers sitting in a vase alongside the Venus, she could be mistaken for a digital apparition. That strange sheen makes her look thrillingly unstable, as if she could vanish into the ether at any moment, caught up in the currents of money and speculation that flow through Mr. Koons’s oeuvre and that are ultimately so essential to it.

For decades, Mr. Koons’s work has looked alluring and only vaguely sinister. Just a few years ago, some wondered if his decadence would weather the recession. Now we have our answer. His work is stronger than ever, and so is the nimbus of darkness around these saccharine daydreams. “I’m always very upset if somebody doesn’t like my work,” Mr. Koons has said, “because I never want to lose anyone.” We’re certainly all still watching.

(Through June 29, 2013)

Kiefer's 'der Morgenthau-Plan,' 2012. (© Anselm Kiefer, courtesy Gagosian Gallery, photograph by Charles Duprat)

“The Morgenthau Plan” was an American proposal, first mooted in 1944, to partition and deindustrialize Germany after the war. It was never enacted precisely as planned, of course, but while the war was still going on, Joseph Goebbels was able to use news of the idea to rally resistance along the Western Front. “The Morgenthau Plan” is also the title of an installation that Anselm Kiefer showed at Gagosian’s new space in Le Bourget, Paris, last year, of his current show at Gagosian in Chelsea, and of several of the massive, oil-and-acrylic-on-photo-on-canvas tableaux in the show.

Kiefer's 'laßt tausend Blumen blühen,' 2012. (© Anselm Kiefer, courtesy Gagosian Gallery, photograph by Charles Duprat)

The plan could certainly be the fertile premise for a robust conceptual engagement with—just to pick from ideas cited in the show’s press release—unintended consequences, industrialism, tyranny and social reorganization, or the sinister inadequacy of mere beauty as an artistic goal. But despite the repetitive insistence of the title, written directly on several canvases as well as on the gallery wall, Mr. Kiefer hasn’t quite gotten there yet—which is too bad, because his paintings hardly need any corpus of explanation in the first place. (Maybe “The Morgenthau Plan” is not a depiction but a demonstration of the dangerous inadequacy of verbal ideas.) One der Morgenthau Plan, for example, comprising three canvases fit tightly together, is just under 10 by 20 feet. Each is covered with a close-up, out-of-focus color photo of a field of flowers, and each photo is almost entirely covered with paint. In the upper half of the composition, translucent layers of gray and blue, thick cracks, drips and stains create a sky of misty, fantastic depth. Tilting across that sky are a dozen ovals, thick knots of paint in charred-bone color that are either blossoms from up close or airships from far away. They blow over on black stems or trail down lines of black smoke into the riot of shockwave strokes and nocturnally floral colors that cover the paintings’ lower half. The raw intensity of abstraction is fit into the direct clarity of figuration: dollops of white paint with black hearts have yellow-orange accents, vague little areas of royal blue float without anchor, and algae-colored stains on the bottom are more like the misremembered synthesis of a meadow than like any one thing you’d ever see. (Through June 8, 2013)

Jean-Michel Basquiat, 'Cassius Clay,' 1982. (Courtesy Gagosian Gallery)

A quarter-century after he died of a drug overdose at the age of 27 in downtown Manhattan, Jean-Michel Basquiat needs no introduction. The fame that he pursued relentlessly and recklessly throughout his brief career seems secure, buoyed by museum retrospectives, films, books, sympathetic critics and a bounty of supremely wealthy collectors, who now buy major works by him for $20 million or more. For anyone who needed proof that this last part isn’t just the result of market hype, there is Gagosian Gallery’s current exhibition of more than 50 works.

The majority of the pieces on view come from 1981 through ’83, when the Haitian-American, Brooklyn-born graffiti artist made his improbable leap into the upper echelon of the art world. The trademark Basquiat work of the time has a central figure—a fisherman, a warrior, a boxer—hovering amid gnomic phrases, some of them crossed out, in front of high-pitched fields of color that compare favorably with Abstract-Expressionist masters Hans Hofmann and Clyfford Still.

Though Basquiat fit perfectly alongside then-ascendant Neo-Expressionists like Julian Schnabel, who aimed to return figurative painting to the realm of vanguard art, a bit of distance shows that he was regularly outclassing them. One of the best works here, La Hara (1981), offers an unhinged-looking cop with blood-red eyes surrounded by an array of marks—smudges, scratches, a thermos and what may be a fence. No wonder he pissed people off.

Many of those early works are so colorful, so humming with anxious, energetic lines that they threaten to produce bodily shocks. Don’t forget, though, that Basquiat could also be uproariously funny (1982’s Obnoxious Liberals has a panicked figure wearing a shirt that reads “Not for sale”) and subtle, perhaps even romantic (1985’s Now’s the Time, an eight-foot-wide circular painting on wood that resembles the eponymous Charlie Parker record, its title written in little white letters at its center).

For me, the real joys come in ’83 and ’84, when Basquiat was cramming more text and bits of photocopied anatomical drawings into his paintings. The frenetic energy has dissipated, but the resulting tableaux, laden with an increasing number of competing figures, elicit intellectual rather than emotional responses.

The prevailing narrative, that Basquiat’s work declined as he reveled in fame and drugs, remains hard to dispute, but the show offers a few startling exceptions, like Riding with Death (1988), one of his last paintings. A nude man is astride a skeletal horse; he seems to be slipping into the bronze monochrome background, disappearing into the picture. (Through April 6)

The duo. (Courtesy PMC)

Dutch photographers Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, known for their outré fashion shoots and celebrity portraits, have signed on with Gagosian. The 12-gallery empire announced the news in a release to press.

Inez & Vinoodh, as they're known, had previously shown in New York at the Matthew Marks Gallery. They have also done shows in London at Victoria Miro and White Cube, and had a 25-year retrospective at the Foam Fotografiemuseum in Amsterdam in 2010.

The move represents something of a trend for Gagosian, which has begun representing a few notable photographers lately. Though Alec Soth moved to Sean Kelly Gallery in 2011, over the past few years the gallery has begun working with Andreas Gursky (another practitioner formerly represented by Marks) and the foundation of the late fashion photographer Richard Avedon.

Still from video showing installation of a Barry Le Va sculpture at "The Floor Show: Gravity and Materials," 2012. (Courtesy Gagosian Gallery and Sonnabend Gallery)

If you've ever stood around a sculpture and wondered about how it was installed—perhaps a sculpture that involves an irreversible process like breaking glass, this super short video posted today by Gagosian for its Los Angeles exhibition "The Floor Show: Gravity and Materials" will come as a small relief—not in the least because it involves breaking glass, the sound of which in itself is just a relief for some reason.

The work in question is a 1968 sculpture by Barry Le Va called Set I A placed B placed; Set II A dropped. B dropped.; Set III A placed. B dropped.; Set IV placed, which is made of felt, glass, aluminum bars and stainless steel ball-bearings. The Gagosian show, organized in collaboration with curator Richard D. Marshall, examines how artists have taken sculpture beyond the pedestal.

In an interview with Gallerist's sister publication The Commercial Observer today, restaurant consultant Steven Kamali, who is working on the the dealer's forthcoming space at 976 Madison Avenue, on the ground floor of the 980 Madison building, said that it could be a restaurant, and not simply a cafe, as Gallerist had previously reported.

“I can tell you we are consulting with the Gagosian Gallery, and we’re helping him curate a restaurant concept for their venue at 980 Madison Avenue,” Mr. Kamali told The CO. The only other detail he would reveal is that the project has applied for a liquor license from the local community board.

Meanwhile, Gallerist stopped by the Landmarks Preservation Commission last week for a look at what Mr. Gagosian and his architect Annabelle Selldorf have planned for their new space.

The plans call for minimal changes to the facade. A "GAGOSIAN" sign is attached above the window. The architect wants to expand and replace that window along with the adjoining doors.

This could  create problems at the commission, according to a source, because Mr. Gagosian is proposing to remove historic details from the window and doors, which are original to the structure. The commission tends to look down on such changes.

Meanwhile, the space itself has been papered over with a possibly telling sign (pictured above) showing the spines of books of a number of Gagosian publications. There is one, however, that is not a book at all. It simply reads, "Fall 2012."

Could this be an opening date for the restaurant cum gallery cum bookstore? We shall wait and see, as a Gagosian spokeswoman did not return a request for comment.

Gagosian, coming to a cafe near you. (Wet Jet)

For decades, Larry Gagosian has been a fixture at Sant Ambroeus, the Upper East Side cafe around the corner from his flagship gallery 980 Madison Avenue, which he opened in the late 1980's. He even has a regular table, where he can watch the rest of the art world stream by, many stopping to pay their respects before taking their own seat inside the eatery that has long been the art world's living room.

But soon Mr. Gagosian will be sipping his espresso closer to home—and it will be curious to see how many of his fellow connoisseurs will follow him.

As Gallerist reported in February, Mr. Gagosian plans to open a cafe in one of the storefronts at 980 Madison, and work is now underway on the project, which will include space for a gallery. In April, permits were filed with the Department of Buildings for demolition, plumbing and renovation work to the storefront previously occupied by the Spot Shop, where tchotchkes connected with the Damien Hirst show (books, prints, cufflinks) had been on sale.

Last week, the construction permits were approved by the city, and they reveal that the new cafe will be designed by Annabelle Selldorf. Additional city records filed with the Landmarks Preservation Commission provide definitive proof that Gagosian Gallery is opening a cafe in the multi-story storefront, along with additional gallery space.

Ms. Selldorf is a frequent collaborator with Mr. Gagosian (as well as with other gallerists for that matter, like David Zwirner), having designed layouts for various Gagosian Gallery shows, everything from the Picasso show in London to Monet and Francesco Vezzoli shows in New York. The latter was widely panned but for the exception of Ms. Selldorf's installation work, which won plaudits for the convincing darkened chapel she created within the gallery to showcase Mr. Vezzoli's kitschy paintings of weeping models.

Ms. Selldorf's office declined to discuss the project, or even whom its client for the space was, citing confidentiality agreements.

Records reveal Mr. Gagosian is creating the cafe with help from Steven Kamali, the 30-year-old hospitality impresario who has worked on projects for the likes of Jeffrey Chodorow, Giuseppe Cipriani and Stephen Starr, as well as helping to open Colors, the failed restaurant created by the Windows on the World staff. Mr. Kamali is a partner in three East End hotels, Surf Lodge, Capri and Ruschmeyer's, for which has been widely credited with Manhattanizing the Hamptons.

Mr. Kamali's name appears as a restaurant consultant on an application filed with the city's Landmark's Preservation Commission. Any alterations to the exterior of the space have to be approved by the Commission—980 Madison lies within the Upper East Side Historic District. Ms. Selldorf's plans call for alterations to the door and the storefront windows, according to architecture drawings on file, changes that would have to be approved by the commissioners.

The only signage on the storefront, according to the drawings, is a monolithic GAGOSIAN. No CAFE GAGOSIAN or, to Gallerist's great disappointment, CHEZ LARRY.

While the building permits do not mention Gagosian Gallery by name—they are filed by RFR Realty, the landlord of 980 Madison that is controlled by fellow art world big shot Aby Rosen—the documents on record with the Landmarks Preservation Commission do.

A spokeswoman for Gagosian, which runs 11 galleries around the world, was unavailable to comment when reached by Gallerist. Mr. Kamali was also unavailable for comment.

The tri-level space, which includes the ground floor, a mezzanine and the basement, will also include room for a gallery, according to DOB records, but it was not clear what would go on where at this point. Still, what better way to enjoy that Richard Prince Nurse or a Cy Twombly sketch than with a warm cappuccino in hand?

And the shopping may not be gone, either, as zoning would allow for a retail kiosk in the space as well, familiar territory for Mr. Gagosian, who used to run a shop on the corner of the building. He vacated that space so that he might move into his current one, which may not have the prime frontage in the building but is bigger, pricier, grander and perhaps a little more discreet. Just like Mr. Gagosian.

Mr. Crewdson at work. (Courtesy Gagosian Gallery)

"My pictures are about a search for a moment—a perfect moment," says photographer Gregory Crewdson in the trailer for Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters, a new documentary directed by Ben Shapiro that premieres on March 10 at SXSW in Austin, Texas.

Mr. Shapiro follows Crewdson behind the scenes of some of his most elaborate sets and best-known works, like those of his series "Twilight," to reveal the artist at work creating some of his haunting cinematic tableaux of small-town American life. Mr. Shapiro has traveled with the photographer for 10 years, following him from the moment of inspiration through various creative and logistical hurdles to completion.

What we like best from the trailer is seeing Mr. Crewdson, who was raised in Park Slope, Brooklyn, walking around in sneakers and shorts knocking things over, giving set directions—"Try sitting right more on the curb a little bit," and making astute observations that might otherwise pass us by—"That's the abyss, right there."

Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters Trailer from Benjamin Shapiro on Vimeo.

Cafe Gilbert?

For the past month, fashionable New Yorkers and art world connoisseurs have been streaming through a storefront at the 980 Madison Avenue building to pick up spotty souvenirs from a Gagosian-branded "spot shop" that was opened to coincide with the globe-spanning 11-gallery "Complete Spot Paintings" exhibition by Damien Hirst. With the spot show upstairs closing in less than two weeks, the Upper East Side may soon trade spots for espresso as Larry Gagosian is in talks with his landlord, Aby Rosen's RFR Realty, to open a cafe in the space (call it Cafe Gilbert).

In an interesting twist, Gagosian traded spaces with lady's fashion line Lisa Perry, who used to occupy the larger mid-block space Gagosian now controls. Her shop will open this spring on the northern corner of 980 Madison, where Gagosian ran a bookshop, which closed unexpectedly in the fall. It was shortly before then that Art+Auction reported rumors of a Gagosian restaurant (Chez Larry?) opening in the former Lisa Perry shop (its full address is 976 Madison), so this latest news jibes with the morsels Gago watchers have already been nibbling at.

Art+Auction reported that plans were in the works for "a retail concept called Art Market" that would also feature "high-end limited editions and coffee-table tomes." (The abandoned safe in the basement of the current spot shop could also allow for some exciting decorating options.)

Representatives for RFR declined to comment and Gagosian Gallery declined to comment.

"It makes total sense," retail broker Faith Hope Consolo of Prudential Douglas Elliman said of the hunger for more eateries on the Upper East Side. "It's in great need up there. Sant Ambroeus can't hold everything together. And have to ever been to Via Quaddrono? You can't even get in the place."

One observer pointed out that with three floors of galleries upstairs, a cafe at 980 Madison was a good fit, one that does not even need to turn a profit but could simply function as a clubhouse for Gagosian regulars. But when the local Greek diners can charge $2.50 for dreck, it should not be too hard for Cafe Gilbert to turn a tidy profit on a decent cup of Joe.

It could be his own version of the ever-popular, often-profitable museum cafe.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Randall's Island.

On Friday, for some routine research, we had another look at the list for the Frieze Art Fair’s first New York outing, which hits Randall's Island May 4-7, and we noticed something new: Gagosian gallery, which wasn’t on the list when Frieze initially released it on Nov. 17, now appears there. This would be considerably less momentous if Gagosian weren’t by a long shot the world’s largest, most powerful gallery, and has also never before participated in a New York art fair. (The gallery is not a member of the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA) and therefore has never participated in that organization’s fair, the Art Show, which runs March 7-11, concurrent with The Armory Show.)

We got in touch with a representative from Frieze, who told us, in an email, that while the fair “can’t comment on individual cases,” she could illuminate a number of scenarios that might account for a gallery being added after the fact, as seems to have occurred here.

When the list was released back in November, it was still in formation, the Frieze rep explained. The appeals process may be ongoing for galleries appealing a rejection, and the list is always announced in advance of the fair’s final architectural plans (the tent’s floor plan, in other words, hasn’t yet been set in stone). The fair also may accept late applications “at the discretion of the selection committee," though the Frieze rep added that “this can happen only while there is still space available in the architectural plan.” Additionally, the rep noted that galleries do occasionally withdraw from the fair, thereby freeing space.

The point about the selection committee is crucial because selection committees, composed of dealers, are the gatekeepers of art fairs, and while their workings are generally shrouded in secrecy, their decisions carry a great deal of weight, and can cause a great deal of upset--see Eigen + Art’s forced one-year hiatus from Art Basel. They also occasionally stir up a lot of finger-wagging about conflict of interest. (This year's committee was comprised of dealers Tanya Bonakdar; Eivind Furnesvik, of Standard Oslo; Jeanne Greenberg, of Salon 94; David Kordansky; Andrzej Przywara, of the Foksal Gallery Foundation; and Esther Schipper.)

We are unlikely to find out the precise scenario through which Gagosian gallery, which has participated in all nine editions of Frieze in London, was admitted to the fair at this late date, but it seems clear that the gallery’s participation is a vote of confidence for the fair’s inaugural New York edition.