MG What motivated you to accept the commission for Reflections: Picasso/Koons at the Alhambra [until March 16], where your work is exhibited alongside Picasso’s? Were you intimidated or excited?

JK Very excited. This exhibition developed through my friendships with Almine Rech and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso. Bernard said to me that he would love to show Pablo Picasso’s The Three Graces [1925] with my Three Graces [2016-2022]. We’ve had a profound relationship for decades since we met in the late 1990s. We have a beautiful, similar understanding of the poetry of art, its profundity and metaphysics. That was the seed that brought this about. 

MG You’ve been having a conversation with the history of art ever since you began the Gazing Ball series in 2013. Doing this project, have you had any new revelations about your interaction with historicism and historical objects? 

JK I love humanism and the reason I create artworks that try to communicate this information is because of the transcendence I’ve experienced in my own life, of opening myself up to the environment. I learned at some point to accept myself, my own being, and in doing so I gained courage, the ability to remove anxiety, to open myself up to experience and the world. In doing so, everything becomes available: all information, all histories, and our interaction with everything. When I’m working with or referencing different artists or times in history, it’s to be able to bend space and time. If you love things and open yourself up to them and give yourself to them, you realise information is abundant. When you focus this information on your interests, you will be connected to the abundance of information in that area, and it allows you to transcend it. It allows you to connect to a universal vocabulary, and that’s where the metaphysics comes in. I believe that is present in this exhibition. If I look at Picasso’s Three Graces, I can feel the cloth and how the cloth is like water. With my Standing Woman (2024), I made a plaster cast of a copy of a Roman sculpture that belonged to Picasso and made a Gazing Ball work from it. You can see the dialogue with water. Alhambra is all based around water, and I could feel it. I believe we can experience pure joy every moment of our lives; we just have to open ourselves up to change. 

MG To be vulnerable to it, and to accept it. 

JK Accepting the self is the beginning of removing anxiety, and it’s through experience that we change and transcend our synapses. Everything in our mind changes through experience, and we become faster. We become different human beings, and we become a different society. I mean, culture changes constantly. That’s another thing that’s evident in this exhibition. It’s a small exhibition, there are only five works: two of Picasso’s, three of mine, but it creates so many openings. 

MG It sounds like the philosophy of Sufism, abandoning complexity and achieving liquidity and fluidity. 

JK One hundred percent. The dialogue of life, of birth, death and change: everything is in play in this exhibition. 

MG  The idea of contemporary art seems to be endlessly growing, expanding and never stopping. Does that concern you? Does that please you? 

JK It’s wonderful. I am so lucky that art came into my life and that it was a vehicle that helped me find meaning in the world. I grew up in York, Pennsylvania, in a very middle-class family. My father was an interior decorator, so I learned aesthetics from him, but art let me be involved in all the human disciplines: philosophy, physics, psychology, theology. It’s so wonderful that people understand that art can effortlessly connect them to all their interests in life. 

MG Do you identify as an American artist? Do you think that’s an interesting perspective or not? 

JK I identify as more of an underdog. Some people in the world come from suffering; I never had that. I grew up with a family with a lot of love and some security. But within the dialogue of art, I did not grow up going to the Museum of Modern Art. I had to find acceptance of myself by myself. I created works that were about self-acceptance, beginning with cultural acceptance. In my Banality (1988) works, I looked at equilibrium, luxury, degradation. All of these bodies of works were about acceptance of cultural identity, and then something like Made in Heaven (1989) was a kind of physical self-acceptance. 

MG One of the striking aspects of your earlier work was the way you presented yourself as an adjunct to your work. Over the past 40 years, have you had any second thoughts about that? 

JK I don’t really have any regrets. I’ve learned a lot of things throughout my life, but I always tried to be of service to my work, because I believe very much in art. There are many ways that I’ve been looked at differently. My intentions have always been to celebrate the true values of art. It’s incredible to be able to share those types of values in an exhibition like this at the Alhambra. What an honour, what an honour. .