Jeff Koons
Kitsch as high art.
Jeff Koons makes balloon animals in mirror-polished steel and sculptures of toys and celebrities. His works have sold for record sums.
Jeff Koons was born in 1955 in York, Pennsylvania. His father ran a furniture and interior decorating shop, and even as a child Koons sold his paintings in the store. He studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. When he moved to New York he first worked in the membership department of the Museum of Modern Art and then as a commodities broker on Wall Street to fund his art.
In the early 1980s he exhibited new vacuum cleaners in illuminated Plexiglas cases in the series The New. In the series Equilibrium of 1985, basketballs float in tanks of water. In 1986 came Rabbit, an inflatable toy rabbit cast in mirror-polished stainless steel. In 2019 it sold for just over 91 million dollars, the highest price then paid for a work by a living artist.
The Banality series of 1988 included Michael Jackson and Bubbles, a gilded porcelain sculpture of the pop star and his chimpanzee. In 1989–1991 he made Made in Heaven, explicit images of himself and the Italian porn star and politician Ilona Staller, Cicciolina, whom he married. The marriage soon ended in a long custody battle over their son. In 1992 he made Puppy, a twelve-metre-high dog of living flowers. One version stands outside the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.
From the mid-1990s he worked on the Celebration series, which includes Balloon Dog: balloon animals in polished steel in colours such as orange, blue and magenta. Koons does not make the works himself. He runs a large studio with many assistants and specialists, rather like a factory. He has been sued several times for copyright infringement because he uses other people’s images.
Koons is one of the most debated artists of our time. Admirers see him as an heir to Duchamp and Warhol who turns everyday kitsch into high art. Critics see his work as a symptom of an art market in which money and celebrity count for more than content. Whatever one’s view, his shiny balloon animals are among the best-known images in contemporary art.