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.

Balloon Monkey (Blue), is a limited edition that transforms a simple twisted rubber balloon monkey into porcelain. Incorporating the vocabulary of his iconic Celebration sculptures, Balloon Monkey, along with two other animals, Balloon Rabbit 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 monkey has been a recurring motif in his body of work. Humankind’s close kinship with primates has captured artist’s fascination throughout history, serving as an allegorical figure for universal themes such as the pursuit of pleasure, sexuality and innocence. Koons merges these typically contradictory concepts through the reduction of the subject to its most essential form.

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“ It is about celebration and childhood and color and simplicity – but it’s also a Trojan horse. It’s a Trojan horse to the whole body of art work. „

—Jeff Koons