Jeffrey Lynn Koons (Parents: Henry and Gloria Koons; Spouses: Ilona Staller, Justine Wheeler) an American artist widely recognized for his work dealing with popular culture, consumerism, and the aesthetics of mass-produced objects. Often a polarizing figure, he is simultaneously hailed as a pioneer of Neo-Pop art and criticized for elevating kitsch to the realm of high art. Regardless of critical division, he is one of the most successful and expensive living artists in history.
Koons studied painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Before finding massive success in the art world, he notably worked as a Wall Street commodities broker to fund his early artistic endeavors. He gained prominence in the 1980s with his Equilibrium series, which featured basketballs suspended in glass tanks filled with distilled water, and vacuum cleaners displayed in illuminated acrylic plexiglass cases.
His breakthrough into global fame came with his Banality series (1988), featuring oversized, highly polished ceramic and wood sculptures of pop culture subjects, most famously Michael Jackson and Bubbles. He courted controversy in the early 1990s with the Made in Heaven series, which featured sexually explicit paintings and glass sculptures of himself and his then-wife, Italian porn star and politician Ilona Staller (Cicciolina).
Koons’s most iconic and universally recognized works belong to his Celebration series, which he began in the 1990s. This includes his massive, flawless stainless steel sculptures designed to look like twisted balloon animals, such as the monumental Balloon Dog. His obsessive attention to detail requires a large, factory-style studio in New York, where over a hundred assistants fabricate the works to his exact, flawless specifications.
In 2019, Koons’s 1986 stainless steel sculpture Rabbit sold at auction for $91.1 million, breaking the record for the highest price ever paid for a work by a living artist at the time. Through his colossal floral puppy sculptures (Puppy, 1992) and gleaming metallic surfaces, Koons continually reflects society’s desires and consumerist obsessions right back at the viewer.
Active in others filds : Commodities Brokerage (Early career), Fashion and Commercial Collaborations (e.g., Louis Vuitton, BMW Art Cars).
