Jeff Koons
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Courtesy of MasterClass
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Jeff Koons is widely regarded as one of the most significant and influential figures in 21st-century art.
b. 1955, York, PA, USA
Lives and works in New York
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Throughout his immensely successful career, Koons has consistently challenged the traditional boundaries between high art and mass culture. By expanding the limits of industrial production and embracing the concept of the readymade, he has transformed the dynamics between artists and global markets.
Jeff Koons studied at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. He obtained his B.F.A. from the Maryland Institute of Art in Baltimore in 1976 and then relocated to New York City.
From the mid-1980s, alongside such artists as Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince, Koons gained prominence as part of the Post-Pop generation. From the outset of his career, he demonstrated a penchant for working in series, exploring various themes and concepts. He pioneered the practice of appropriation, which involved replicating mundane commercial images and objects with slight alterations in size or material. His artistic style has evolved from small-scale assemblages of found objects to the creation of his now legendary monumental works.
Among artist’s most iconic works are the sculptures depicting everyday objects, including balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror-finish surfaces, including "Rabbit" (1986), "Balloon Dog" (1994), as well as his monumental topiary sculpture "Puppy" (1992), permanently installed at the Guggenheim Bilbao.
The work by Jeff Koons has been a subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including artists' retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1992–93 and a major retrospective organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2014, which subsequently toured the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Guggenheim Bilbao.
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Works
Jeff Koons
Dirty – Jeff on Top, 1991Oil inks on canvas152,4 × 228,6 cmFurther images
“When I made it, I was just thinking about the ideas around me. I was involved with banal images. I realized that people respond to banal things; they don’t accept...“When I made it, I was just thinking about the ideas around me. I was involved with banal images. I realized that people respond to banal things; they don’t accept their own history; they’re not participating in acceptance within their own being. I started then to take that into the body. Where do people start to feel guilt and shame and rejection of the self?” – Jeff Koons
To this day, Made in Heaven remains the most controversial work in Jeff Koons' career. This provocative series—comprising paintings, sculptures, and installations—celebrates, in unabashedly explicit terms, his union with his wife Ilona Staller, the Italian porn star and politician known as La Cicciolina.
For the project, Koons adopted Ilona’s usual photographer and backdrops, immersing his imagery in the aesthetics of glamour photography. By blurring the line between fine art and pornography, he directly confronted traditional notions of artistic taste and moral boundaries. Rather than dictate meaning, Koons left his audience to grapple with their own perceptions, forcing them to question where they draw the line between art, intimacy, and provocation.