Jeff Koons
American artist Jeff Koons was born in 1955 in York, Pennsylvania (USA), and developed a passion for art at a very young age. As a child, he copied paintings of the Old Masters, signed them with his own name and sold them in his father’s store. He studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore (Maryland, USA) and took part in an exchange programme at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Illinois, USA). After graduating in 1976, he moved to New York City (New York, USA), where he lives and works to this day. For a time, he held several entry-level positions at the Museum of Modern Art, where his eccentric appearance and persuasive manner at the membership desk left a lasting impression. It was during this period that he produced his first assemblages of inflatable objects and industrial materials, foreshadowing his future sculptures. He left the MoMA in 1979 to become a commodities broker on Wall Street, generating the financial security he needed to create his first seminal works.
Koons explores the mechanisms of desire that govern contemporary visual culture through references drawn from both high and popular cultures, deprioritised and revalued. From the late 1970s onward, he worked with industrial objects — such as vacuums and carpet cleaners — and displayed them in clear plexiglass cases, reviving the spirit of the readymade. His early series of works, The New (1980-1987) and Equilibrium (1983 -1993), illustrate his attraction to spectacular compositions, where the objects’ symbolic weight supplants their presumed triviality. The Banality (1988) and Celebration (1994-2019) series reflect the core interests of the Koons’s artistic practice: polychromatic works in vibrant colours and reflective metallic surfaces exalting the readymade while inviting observers to see their own reflection, to literally see themselves within the works. Furthermore, the complex paintings he has produced since the 1990s — monumental collages saturated with visual references, as seen in the series Easyfun (1999–2000) and Hulk Elvis (2004-) — challenge the legacy of art history and the power of images in mass culture. Lastly, Koons’s monumental public works, including Puppy (1992) and Split-Rocker (2000), are further extensions of his fascination with a sense of wonder and theatricality, and have brought him international acclaim.
Since 1980, when he had his first solo exhibition at the New Museum in New York (USA), Koons has become firmly established on the global art scene. His works can be found in international museum collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Tate Modern in London (United Kingdom), the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (The Netherlands), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (USA) and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo (Japan), among others. Koons’s countless exhibits include solo presentations at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence (Italy, 2022), the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (United Kingdom, 2019), the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (Spain, 2015), the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, the Centre Pompidou in Paris (France, 2014), the Château de Versailles (France, 2013), the Fondation Beyeler in Basel (Switzerland, 2012), and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (Germany, 2008) among others. In recognition of his work in strengthening Franco-American relations, Koons was made an Officer of France’s National Order of the Legion of Honor; he also received the Medal of the Arts from the U.S. Department of State in 2013 for his involvement in the Art in Embassies Program and international cultural exchange, confirming the global reach of his work.
