Jeff Koons is a world renowned artist famous for his lustrous sculptures focused on themes from pop culture and artifacts, his chromatic balloon dogs, monkeys, and swans selling for millions of dollars and grace public spaces, museums, and private homes across the globe. His works draw inspiration from daily life, familiar objects, rooted in American history and culture with a wide spectrum of techniques he uses that have contributed to making his work mesmerizing and evoke various emotions.
Early life | Jeff Koons
Jeff Koons was born in 1955 in York, Pennsylvania, his father was a furniture dealer, and worked as an interior designer and decorator. From there he developed a talent for drawing and painting at a young age, began creating replicas of old master paintings that his father exhibited in his showroom of decorating business. Koons was fascinated by and revered the works of Spanish artist Salvador Dali, and met him during his stay in New York, and attended an exhibition of his works at the Knoedler Gallery together. Later Koons enrolled at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, where he continued to foster his work and interest in Dali, painting Neo-Surrealist dreamscapes. After graduating from college, Jeff Koons moved to New York City in the late 1970s where he initially started working as a stockbroker on Wall Street and later took a job selling memberships at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). In 1980, Koons left MoMA and debuted his first exhibition series in the New Museum on 14th Street in Lower Manhattan.
Philosophy
The artist works at first glance can often be mistaken as fatalous or superficial- especially Balloon dogs, Play-doh, String of Puppies, and tulips that draw heavily on childhood nostalgia, kitsch, and pop culture, but it is deeply rooted in the philosophy that is “reflect” which can be seen in his lot of work with polished mirror surfaces. Koons has a fascination with mirrors from childhood and how they affirmed the viewer, and this aspect of affirmation became important to him, which is reflected in his later works. When Koons started working with readymade objects that have a strong kind of Pop, the Duchampian type of aspect to work made him believe that everything’s a full circle, like a yin and yang, which he stated with:
“The idea of subjective to the objective is not a linear line but it’s circular.”
Works
Koon’s first breakthrough was a window installation in 1980, staged at New York New Museum. The exhibition was designed to look like a showroom presenting a vacuum cleaner and other appliances illuminated by harsh fluorescent lights and plexiglass boxes. Over the following years, Koons had solo exhibitions and achieved a major media attraction along with fellow artists (Peter Halley, Ashley Bickerton) appeared on the cover of New York Magazine acquiring the title “the Hot Four ”. Koons rose to international fame in 1988 when he unveiled Banality which was presented at Sonnabend Gallery in New York, Max Hetzler Gallery in Cologne, and Donald Young Gallery in Chicago. The series features porcelain sculptures combined with the sentimental aesthetic of figurines with celebrity and pop culture, the most famous being Michael Jackson and Bubbles.
Koon’s work grew dramatically with the iconic success of the exhibition and the addition of a large 43-foot-tall Puppy sculpture to its permanent collection at Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain. Koons continued to stage solo outings at Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Chosun-Ilbo Museum in Seoul, Mnuchin Gallery in New York, the Helsinki City Art Museum in Finland.
Perhaps Koons best-known work is the Celebration Series, originally conceived in 1994 consists of 20 highly polished stainless steel objects of different colors, featuring balloon dogs, swans, monkeys, different types of flowers, oversized hearts, diamonds, and eggs. The cracked blue egg sculpture won the Charles Wollaston Award for his most renowned work in the London Royal Academy.
Later works made him the star artist and marked his footprint in the world of pop culture and fashion. Koons collaborated with Lady Gaga to design the cover art for her album, also with Louis Vuitton, H&M, BMW, and Dom Pérignon. His works in recent years rise to the values of contemporary art and continue to explore themes related to sexuality, celebrity, consumerism, and childhood that are created in a studio in Hudson Yards, New York City.
Critical reception
Koons has gained both rave reviews and strong word critiques in his whole career. His most controversial series Made in Heaven made great headlines in the 1990s for its large photographs and nude sculptures that received widespread contemplation from critics. Koon’s work is reviled and revered for many reasons, as his admirers have lauded him for his work on consumerism, boldness, materialism, and the meaningful contrast he creates. On the other hand, critics call his pieces crude, expansive, and vacuous. Although Koons finds the impression of criticism in opposition to his ideals of acceptance.
2wqaq Legacy of Koons | Jeff Koons
Koons has influenced many other artists who explore commercialism, readymade objects, and new concepts of Pop Art like Isa Gentzken and Hank Willis, as well as emerging art stars such as Darren Bader and Nick Darmstaedter. Perhaps most prominently Damien Hirst, a key member of the Young British Artists. Hirst’s world-famous shark suspended in a tank of formaldehyde is influenced by Koons’ Equilibrium series. Another American artist Paul McCarthy was intimated by Koons and created several sculptures based on Michael Jackson and Bubbles.
