When I saw Jeff Koons’s new paintings, my initial thoughts turned to their presentation—the timing couldn’t have been better. These painted collages—exhibited to great effect, thanks to their billboard format, in the claustrophobic spaces of the Deutsche Guggenheim—fitted perfectly into a range of issues, from the ongoing visual-culture debate to the revival of photorealist painting. In addition, they implicitly demanded an engagement with the potential of so-called appropriation art of the ’80s, a potential that has so far been undervalued. In this connection, it is interesting

Without mutual trust this exhibition might not have been possible. The Galerie Gebauer left its rooms to Stuttgart artist Peter Pommerer so that he could spend three weeks filling them with large-format wall drawings—knowing full well that, given his working method, he might produce anything from rhizomatic scribbling to cross-cultural ornamentation, from children’s-room fantasies to crude configurations of bodies in the spirit of art brut. But, in the end, Pommerer controlled himself: With minimal watercolor strokes and colored-pencil lines, one room was made a sort of jungle, a second inscribed