Jeff Koons

Artist

• Born: January 21, 1955
• Place of Birth: York, Pennsylvania

Koons gained fame in the United States as a major conceptual/pop artist noted especially for his deployment of kitsch for the purposes of high art.

Artist. A hot young artist in the “Reagan years” of the previous decade, in the 1990s Jeff Koons built on his already controversial reputation and reached new levels of both commercial success and artistic recognition. Koons was especially known for transforming simple objects into large and mysteriously empowered sculptures that could be read as either ironic commentary on a shallow and meaningless contemporary consumerism or as a deeper, more ambiguous investigation of pop culture, especially popular imagery associated with childhood. In 1992, for instance, Koons created a major piece called Puppy, a monumental forty-three-foot-tall, eighty-eight-ton sculpture of a terrier composed of sixty thousand flowers on a stainless-steel armature. The fascinating puppy was displayed for a time in Rockefeller Center in New York City. In 1997, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation installed it permanently outside the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

Less successful was Koons’s 1991 marriage to Ilona Staller, the Italian pornography star. Before their marriage, Koons created and posed with Staller in perhaps his most controversial art pieces—a surreal and sexually explicit series of paintings, photographs, and sculptures called Made in Heaven. The divorce of Staller and Koons later in the decade, followed by a bitter child custody dispute, created yet more publicity for the increasingly notorious artist.

In 1993, Koons began a series of paintings and sculptures titled Celebration, which consisted of works based on childhood toys and trinkets. Of special note were pieces that recalled the entertaining art of twisting balloons into animal shapes, conceptualized by Koons into big balloon dogs rendered in candy-colored chrome. Koons’s failed child custody battle and the cost of the ongoing Celebration series led to considerable financial reversals, but he recovered in 1999, when his sculpture based on the cartoon character the Pink Panther sold for just under $2 million. One of the pieces in the Celebration series, Egg (Blue), won the 2008 Charles Wollaston Award for the most distinguished work in the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition.

Koons created a sculpture of pop singer Lady Gaga for the cover of her 2013 album Artpop, and in 2014 he ventured into digital artwork with an "augmented reality sculpture," titled Lady Bug, which is viewable only through a mobile app. A retrospective exhibition of his work opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2014; his 2000 sculpture Split-Rocker was temporarily installed at Rockefeller Plaza that year to promote the exhibition.

Koons is internationally recognized and has a list of honors from around the globe. In 2019, Koons was named an honorary professor of Sculpture at the Fine Arts Academy of Carrara, Italy. In 2021, he was presented the Renaissance Man of the Year Award in Florence, Italy, by the Palazzo Strozzi Foundation. He was honored in 2022 at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden groundbreaking ceremony in Washington, DC. He also engages in talks and lectures around the world. In 2023, he visited the K599 Brooklyn Landmark Elementary School in New York City to give his lecture "Studio in a School," and he gave a speech titled "The Animated Sculpture: Jeff Koons Artist Talk" in Frankfurt, Germany. A SpaceX rocket carrying 125 of Koon's steel miniature moon sculptures landed on the moon in February 22, 2024, after departing from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida earlier in the month.

Koons was often derided for his self-promotion; similarly, his work was dismissed as pandering to the desires of the marketplace. Although his art has been denounced as crass and cynical, many perceived mysterious hidden depths beneath his decorative surfaces.

Impact

Koons was perceived as a phenomenon both in terms of his commercial success and his controversial artwork. Disdained by some critics as decadent, tacky, cheap, and sensationalistic, his pieces nevertheless won a great deal of contemporary institutional acceptance, including an exhibition at London’s Royal Academy. Of consistently high market value, his work fetched millions at auction, making him one of the highest-earning artists of his time. He also exerted a major influence on younger artists and found acceptance as an original and important figure within the very high art tradition, whose premises he appeared to subvert.

Bibliography

"Biography—Awards and Honors" Jeff Koons, Mar. 2023, www.jeffkoons.com/biography-awards-and-honors. Accessed 22 May 2024.

"Jeff Koons: High Art or Plain Extravagance?" Al Jazeera, 22 Aug. 2015, www.aljazeera.com/program/talk-to-al-jazeera/2015/8/22/jeff-koons-high-art-or-plain-extravagance. Accessed 22 May 2024.

Palumbo, Jacqui. "Artist Jeff Koons Makes History with a Sculpture on the Moon." CNN, 22 Feb. 2024, www.cnn.com/2024/02/22/style/jeff-koons-moon-phases-odysseus-landing/index.html. 22 May 2024.

Sischy, Ingrid. "Jeff Koons Is Back!" Vanity Fair, July 2014, archive.vanityfair.com/article/2015/11/jeff-koons-is-back. Accessed 22 May 2024.

Smith, Roberta. "Shapes of an Extroverted Life." New York Times, 26 June 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/06/27/arts/design/jeff-koons-a-retrospective-opens-at-the-whitney.html. Accessed 22 May 2024.

Sylvester, David. “Jeff Koons.” Interviews with American Artists. Yale UP, 2001.

Tomkins, Calvin. “The Turnaround Artist: Jeff Koons Up from Banality.” New Yorker, vol. 83, no. 9, 2007, pp. 58-67.