Jeff Koons

Jeffrey Lynn Koons (born January 21, 1955) is an American artist recognized for his work dealing with popular culture and his sculptures depicting everyday objects, including balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror-finish surfaces.

He lives and works in both New York City and his hometown of York, Pennsylvania.

While a student at the Art Institute, Koons met the artist Ed Paschke, who became a major influence and for whom Koons worked as a studio assistant in the late 1970s.

After college, Koons moved to New York in 1977 and worked at the membership desk of the Museum of Modern Art while establishing himself as an artist.

During this time, he dyed his hair red and often wore a pencil mustache, after Salvador Dalí.

Between 1977 and 1979 Koons produced four separate artworks, which he later referred to as Early Works.

Starting from 1978 he worked on his Inflatables series, consisting of inflatable flowers and a rabbit of various heights and colors, positioned along with mirrors.

Since 1979 Koons has produced work within series.

His early work was in the form of conceptual sculpture, an example of which is The Pre-New, a series of domestic objects attached to light fixtures, resulting in strange new configurations.

Another example is The New, a series of vacuum-cleaners, often selected for brand names that appealed to the artist like the iconic Hoover, which he had mounted in illuminated Perspex boxes.

In 1980, he became licensed to sell mutual funds and stocks and began working as a Wall Street commodities broker at First Investors Corporation.

After a summer with his parents in Sarasota, Florida, where he briefly worked as a political canvasser, Koons returned to New York and found a new career as a commodities broker, first at Clayton Brokerage Company and then at Smith Barney.

Jeff Koons rose to prominence in the mid-1980s as part of a generation of artists who explored the meaning of art in a newly media-saturated era.

He gained recognition in the 1980s and subsequently set up a factory-like studio in a SoHo loft on the corner of Houston Street and Broadway in New York.

It was staffed with over 30 assistants, each assigned to a different aspect of producing his work—in a similar mode as Andy Warhol's Factory.

Koons's work is produced using a method known as art fabrication.

Koons first exhibited these pieces in the window of the New Museum in New York in 1980.

He chose a limited combination of vacuum cleaners and arranged them in cabinets accordingly, juxtaposing the verticality of the upright cleaners with the squat cylinders of the "Shelton Wet/Dry drum" cleaners.

At the museum, the machines were displayed as if in a showroom, and oriented around a central red fluorescent lightbox with just the words "The New" written on it as if it were announcing some new concept or marketing brand.

Another example for Koons' early work is The Equilibrium Series (1983), consisting of one to three basketballs floating in distilled water, a project the artist had researched with the help of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman.

The Total Equilibrium Tanks are completely filled with distilled water and a small amount of ordinary salt, to assist the hollow balls in remaining suspended in the centre of the liquid.

In a second version, the 50/50 Tanks, only half the tank is filled with distilled water, with the result that the balls float half in and half out of the water.

In addition, Koons conceived and fabricated five unique works for the Encased series (1983–1993/98), sculptures consisting of stacked sporting balls (four rows of six basketballs each, and one row of six soccer balls) with their original cardboard packaging in glass display case.

They were shown again in a major solo show at Jeff Koons: The New Encased Works at Daniel Weinberg Gallery in 1987.

His works have sold for substantial sums, including at least two record auction prices for a work by a living artist: US$58.4 million for Balloon Dog (Orange) in 2013 and US$91.1 million for Rabbit in 2019.

Critics come sharply divided in their views of Koons.

Some view his work as pioneering and of major art-historical importance.

Others dismiss his work as kitsch, crass, and based on cynical self-merchandising.

Koons has stated that there are no hidden meanings or critiques in his works.

Koons was born in York, Pennsylvania, to Henry and Gloria Koons.

His father was a furniture dealer and interior decorator.

His mother was a seamstress.

When he was nine years old, his father would place old master paintings that Koons copied and signed in the window of his shop in an attempt to attract visitors.

As a child he went door-to-door after school selling gift-wrapping paper and candy to earn pocket money.

As a teenager he revered Salvador Dalí so much that he visited him at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City.

Koons studied painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

He lived in Lakeview, and then in the Pilsen neighborhood at Halsted Street and 19th Street.

Until 2019, Koons had a 1500 sqm studio factory near the old Hudson rail yards in Chelsea and employed upwards of 90 to 120 assistants to produce his work.

More recently, Koons has downsized staffing and shifted to more automated forms of production and relocated to a much smaller studio space.

Koons used a color-by-numbers system, so that each of his assistants could execute his canvases and sculptures as if they had been done "by a single hand".