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.

Jeff Koons, along with seven other leading international artists, were asked to create a print to celebrate Tate Modern’s 21st anniversary. A third of the profits from the sale of each print will benefit Tate.
With his print for Tate 21 Koons continues his dialogue with classical artists of the past, in this instance with the Italian painter Annibale Carracci (1560–1609), one the most admired artist of his time and a vital force in the creation of Baroque style.

Derived from one of Carracci's series of erotic etchings known as the Lascivie and delineated in silver foil is a partial image of a female nude figure and her companion. Intertwined with this line is a flowing, looping ribbon of celebratory blue foil, a colour similar in hue to the blue glass balls that adorn Koon's recent Gazing Balls. At times the silver foil catches the light from a certain directions, bringing the female figure into sharp relief, while at others the two foil lines combine with the dreamy background landscape to offer a more sensory abstract experience.

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