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Jeff Koons

by Annie Saxena on Feb 09, 2023

“Art is really just communication of something”- Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons is an American artist, widely regarded as one of the most important, influential, popular, and controversial artists of the post-war era. Throughout his career, he has pioneered new approaches to readymade art, tested the boundaries between advanced art and mass culture, challenged the limits of industrial fabrication, and transformed the relationship of artists to the cult of celebrity and the global market. He is best known for his reproductions of banal objects, such as Balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror finish surfaces. His sculptures often involve smooth, glistening surfaces, while his paintings employ bright and saturated colors.

Jeff Koons was born in 1955, in York, Pennsylvania. As a teenager, he revered Salvador Dalí, to the extent that he visited him at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City. After high school, he headed south to Maryland, where he attended the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. Koons enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, as well, an institution that would grant him an honorary doctorate more than 30 years later. While he was a visiting student at the Art Institute, Koons met the artist Ed Paschke, who became a major influence and for whom he worked as a studio assistant in the late 1970s. After college, he worked at the Museum of Modern Art while establishing himself as an artist. Jeff Koons had his first solo show in 1980, and by the mid-1980s, he was making a name for himself in New York as a modern pop artist along the lines of Andy Warhol.

Employing craftsmen and manufacturers, Koons designs sculptures that mimic crappy knickknacks and iconic objects, earning both praise and condemnation from critics.

Among his first important projects was a series of installations in the 1980’s that showcased ordinary store-bought objects such as vacuum cleaners and shampoo machines encased in plexi glasses with tube lighting beneath the machines.

These appliances seemed to be icons of domestic culture and of the consumerism that characterizes the modern world, but were also animated appliances that, isolated from their normal contexts, took on a strangely physical presence as “breathing machines.”

All of Koon’s early work was in the form of conceptualized sculptures. One of his most famous pieces was, “Michael Jackson And Bubbles”- a lifesize gold-leaf plated statue of the sitting singer cuddling Bubbles, his pet chimpanzee. Just three years after it was made, it sold at Sotheby’s New York for $5,600,000, trebling Koons’ previous sale record.

Since his emergence in the art world, Jeff Koons has blended the concerns and methods of pop, conceptual, and appropriation art with craft-making and popular culture to create his own unique iconography, often controversial and always engaging. Probably his most recognizable artworks, “The Balloon Dogs” embrace the neo-kitsch form of art. In 2013, one artwork from the series was auctioned and became the most expensive piece of art by a living artist. Jeff Koons’ 12-foot sculpture Balloon Dog has broken records to become the most expensive piece of art by a living artist sold at auction. The giant stainless steel sculpture sold for $58.4 million at an auction at Christie’s in New York. The Balloon Dog sculptures have been exhibited throughout the world, from the Grand Canal in Venice to the roof terrace of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Speaking about the artwork, Koons told Christie’s: “When I made ‘Balloon Dog’, I wanted to make a piece that reflected the joy of celebrating a birthday or a party. The Balloon Dog is materialism and monumentality. In many ways, it is like the Trojan horse.”

In his work since the mid-1990s—in series such as Celebration (1995–98), Easyfun (1999–2000), Easyfun/Ethereal (2000–02), Popeye (2003), and Hulk Elvis (2007), Koons has continued to produce sculptures but has also concentrated on complex paintings that oscillate between abstraction and pop-culture references.

Koons has had numerous solo exhibitions since a 1980 window installation at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, including shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli , Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. He received the BZ Cultural Award from the City of Berlin in 2000 and the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture in 2001. He was named a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor in 2002 and then promoted to Officer in 2007, and was given the Wollaston Award from the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2008.

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