Jeff Koons

Biography

Jeff Koons is among the most expensive living artists. In May 2019, Jeff Koons sculpture "Rabbit" was auctioned for 91 million dollars. The works of the American, born in 1955 in York, Pennsylvania, always oscillate in an ironic way between art and kitsch. As a starting point, he often uses evidence of our consumer culture, which he alienates or imitates. In doing so, he deliberately employs key stimuli, which can often have sexual connotations. For the artist, there is hardly a medium in which he has not dabbled: painting, installation, photography, and sculpture.

Jeff Koons' father, who was an interior designer and owner of a furniture store, encouraged his son's talent early on. This was followed by art studies in Baltimore and Chicago and, in 1976, a move to New York, where he initially worked as a broker on Wall Street to finance the increasingly expensive production of his artworks. In his early work he presented "Inflatables" as well as everyday objects, for example vacuum cleaners in Plexiglas showcases and baseballs floating in water tanks. In the realization of his often technically elaborate and extremely complex projects, he repeatedly communicated with renowned scientists. Beginning in the mid-1980s, a flurry of exhibition activity set in, the renowned New York Sonnabend Gallery signed Jeff Koons, and the art world became increasingly aware of him. Series such as "Luxury and Degradation" and "Statuary," which includes the world-famous "Rabbit," brought the final breakthrough. With this sculpture and later works such as "Balloon Dog", Jeff Koons created "icons of late modernism"¹.

¹Hans Werner Holzwarth (ed.), Jeff Koons, Cologne 2009, p. 229