Jeff Koons
Jeffrey Lynn Koons 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. 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 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.
Early life
Koons was born in York, Pennsylvania, to Henry Koons and Gloria J. 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 before transferring to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied from 1975 to 1976. 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. He lived in Lakeview, and then in the Pilsen neighborhood at Halsted Street and 19th Street.
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. 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.
Work
Following his graduation from the Art Institute in Chicago in 1976, Koons made his way to New York City. There, he moved away from creating representations of his personal fantasies and began to explore objective art, commerce, and politics. He 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 with his Pre-new The New series. With recognition came the establishment of a factory-like studio located in a loft at the corner of Houston Street and Broadway in New York in SoHo. 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. Until 2019, Koons had a studio factory near the old Hudson rail yards in Chelsea employing 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. He now uses technology to create his artistic references on computers and color-corrects them until he is satisfied with the results. To ensure consistency, Koons implemented 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". Throughout his career, he has consistently explored themes such as consumerist behavior, seduction, banality, and childhood, among others.''Early Works'' and ''Inflatables''
Jeff Koons first began experimenting with the use of ready-made objects and modes of display in his apartment in 1976. His fascination with the extravagant world of luxurious goods and their more affordable counterparts led him to collect items like toys, metallic finishes, leopard skin, and porcelain. Between 1977 and 1979 Koons produced four separate artworks, which he later referred to as Early Works. In 1978 he began working on his Inflatables series, consisting of inflatable flowers and a rabbit of various heights and colors, positioned along with mirrors. Koons drew inspiration from Robert Smithson's emphasis on display and connected his work to his father's furniture store displays. He documented his work through photography, using it as a means of exploring different installation techniques.''The Pre-New'', ''The New'', and ''Equilibrium'' series
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. 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. They were shown again in a major solo show at Jeff Koons: The New Encased Works at Daniel Weinberg Gallery in 1987.Another example for Koons's early work is The Equilibrium Series, 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, sculptures consisting of stacked sporting balls with their original cardboard packaging in glass display case. Also part of the Equilibrium series are posters featuring basketball stars in Nike advertisements and 10 bronze objects, representing lifesaving gear.
''Statuary'' series
In 1986, Jeff Koons introduced the Statuary series, featuring ten pieces that reimagined his earlier inflatable series from the 1970s. The series aimed to illustrate how art often mirrors self-perception and evolves into decorative expression by presenting a panoramic view of society. The sculptures drew inspiration from historical figures like Louis XIV and Bob Hope, as well as other art historical themes and sources. Through Statuary, Koons redirected his artistic focus toward the concept of artistic taste and the societal role of art. He incorporated some readymade objects, including the inflatable rabbit, and transformed them into highly polished stainless-steel pieces. This led to the creation of one of his most iconic works, Rabbit.There are three identical versions of Rabbit. One version was previously part of art collector Stefan Edlis's personal collection, but it now resides as a gift at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and another in The Broad Museum in Los Angeles. In May 15, 2019, Jeff Koons set a record for most expensive piece sold by a living artist, for the sale of "Rabbit". The third version of the piece was sold at Christie's Auction House for US$80 million which. After including auctioneer's fees, the final sale price of "Rabbit" was US$91,075,000.
The Rabbit has since returned to its original soft form, and many times larger at more than 50 feet high, taken to the air. On October 15, 2009, the giant metallic monochrome color rabbit used during the 2007 Macy's Thanksgiving day parade was put on display for Nuit Blanche in the Eaton Centre in Toronto. The other objects of the series combine objects Koons found in souvenir shops and baroque imagery, thereby playing with the distinction between low art and high art.
''Luxury and Degradation'' series and ''Kiepenkerl''
First shown in Koons's eponymous exhibitions at the short-lived International With Monument Gallery, New York, and at Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles, in 1986, the Luxury and Degradation series is a group of works thematically centered on alcohol. This group included a stainless steel travel cocktail cabinet, a Baccarat crystal decanter and other hand-made renderings of alcohol-related paraphernalia, as well as reprinted and framed ads for drinks such as Gordon's Gin, Hennessy, Bacardi, Dewars, Martell and Frangelico in seductively intensified colors on canvas. Koons appropriated these advertisements and revalued them by recontextualizing them into artworks. They "deliver a critique of traditional advertising that supports Baudrillard's censorious view of the obscene promiscuity of consumer signs". Another work, Jim Beam – J.B. Turner Engine, is based on a commemorative, collectible in bottle in the form of a locomotive that was created by Jim Beam; however, Koons appropriated this model and had it cast in gleaming stainless-steel. The train model cast in steel titled Jim Beam – Baggage Car even contains Jim Beam bourbon. With the Luxury and Degradation series Koons interfered into the realms of the social. He created an artificial and gleaming surface which represented a proletarian luxury. It was interpreted as seduction by simulation because it was fake luxury. Being the producer of this deception brought him to a kind of leadership, as he commented himself.The same material of stainless steel was used for the statue of Kiepenkerl. After being rebuilt in the 1950s, the figure of the itinerant trader was replaced by Jeff Koons in 1987 for the decennial Skulptur Projekte exhibition. Standing on a central square in Münster, the statue retained a certain cultural power as a nostalgic symbol of the past. During the production process, the foundry where the piece was being made wanted to knock the ceramic shell off too soon, which resulted in the piece being bent and deformed. Koons decided to bring in a specialist and give the piece "radical plastic surgery." After this experience he felt liberated: "I was now free to work with objects that did not necessarily pre-exist. I could create models."