Jeff Koons (born 1955) playfully tests the boundaries of commerce, celebrity, banality, and pleasure. He rose to prominence in the mid-1980s as part of a generation of artists who explored the meaning of art in a media-saturated era. Koons turns banal commercial or everyday objects into art icons by using seductive materials, a shift of scale, and a contextual displacement. Jeff Koons’s “Balloon Dog” (featuring his enormous iconic chromium stainless steel dogs); his large-scale vinyl “Inflatables”; or the giant “Split-Rocker” all follow this principle. For instance, Jeff Koons in “Puppy” engaged the past and the present, referencing the eighteenth-century formal garden, while adding the most sugary of iconography. Originally licensed as a commodities broker, Koons decided to become an artist in the late 1970s and moved from Wall Street into a factory-like studio in SoHo with hundreds of assistants. Since then, he has produced different iconic series, like the “Pre-New”, a series of domestic objects in strange new configurations, and “The Equilibrium” series, consisting of basketballs floating in distilled water tanks. The “Banality” series, which includes Jeff Koons´s “Michael Jackson and Bubbles” and “Woman in Tub”, among others, is characterized by oddly eroticized, comic, and kitsch images. However, it is indeed Koons’s “Made in Heaven” series that is his most provocative and controversial work, in which he examines the place of sexuality in visual culture. Koons is widely regarded as one of the most important, influential, and controversial contemporary artists. He constantly tests the boundaries between art and commerce, high culture and mass culture, ready-made and art objects, by decontextualizing his objects and lifting them to iconic status. Jeff Koons´s art is the result of his intention to bring it out of the enclave of the genius-driven artist into the realms of contemporary pop and commerce-driven culture.

Jeff Koons

One of the most famous artists working today, Jeff Koons makes gleeful, tongue-in-cheek sculptures, paintings, and installations that border—and often cross—the edge of good taste.

https://data.wengcontemporary.com/media/Jeff_Koons_Balloon_Animals_Set_II_Content_Sheet_UPDATED_2023.pdf

This set of Jeff Koons´ Balloon Animals II includes the newest limited editions made of highly reflective porcelain, covering the remaining canonic Koons colors. Incorporating the vocabulary of his iconic Celebration sculptures, Balloon Rabbit, Balloon Monkey and Balloon Swan marked a spectacular new chapter in Jeff Koons’s oeuvre.

Jeff Koons has been interested in cultural subject matter with widespread appeal throughout his career. It is, therefore, fitting that the rabbit, the monkey and the swan have been recurring motifs in his body of work. These subjects have captured artist’s fascination throughout history, serving as allegorical figures for universal themes such as the pursuit of pleasure, sexuality and innocence. Koons merges these typically contradictory concepts through the reduction of the subjects to their most essential forms.

Dimensions:
Rabbit: 29,2 x 13,9 x 21 cm (11.5 x 5.4 x 8.2 in.)
Monkey: 24,9 x 20,9 x 39,2 cm (9.8 x 8.2 x 15.4 in.)
Swan: 24,1 x 16,4 x 21 cm (9.4 x 6.4 x 8.2 in.)

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“ One of the things that I’m most proud of is making work that lets viewers not feel intimidated by art, but feel that they can emotionally participate in it through their senses and their intellect and be fully engaged. „

—Jeff Koons