Jeff Koons

One of the most famous and polarising artists of our time, Jeff Koons is America’s preeminent working artist. Transforming everyday ephemera into gleeful, crowd-pleasing art, he is best known for his oversized “readymade” sculptures in bright neon colours. His Balloon Dogs are among the most iconic works of art of the modern era, with their sleek, glistening surfaces adding a visceral dimension to his trademark kitsch aesthetic.

Born in 1955 in Pennsylvania, USA, while studying for a degree at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Koons met the painter Ed Paschke, who was a crucial influence on his early style. Settling in New York in 1977, he worked for the Museum of Modern Art before becoming a broker on Wall Street.

The world of finance sparked his interest in mass consumerism as the bedrock of the American Dream, leading him to produce the ‘Inflatables’ series in the late 1970s, casting a balloon animal in highly polished stainless steel to achieve a mirror-like effect. These sculptures, like the seminal 1986 work Rabbit, earned him acclaim on the Pop Art scene, alongside his peers Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.

Other influential series by Koons include 1988’s ‘Banality’ and the controversial ‘Made in Heaven’, which saw the artist assuming explicit sexual positions with his then-wife Ilona Staller. His most recent series, ‘Gazing Ball’, presents repainted versions of Old Master works, with a shiny blue sphere placed in front of each, representing “the vastness of the universe and at the same time the intimacy of right here, right now”.

Koons’ works are included in some of the world’s most prestigious international public and private collections. With many notable retrospectives at a plethora of museums, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, MOCA Los Angeles, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Whitney Museum in New York and the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the artist’s dominant market of both original works and editions is underpinned by record-breaking auction results. In 2019, Rabbit fetched $91.1 at Christie’s New York, setting a new world auction record for a work by a living artist.