Jeffrey Lynn Koons is an American artist recognized for his work dealing with popular culture and his sculptures depicting everyday objects, including balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror-finish surfaces.
75 Facts About Jeff Koons
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Jeff Koons's works have sold for substantial sums, including at least two record auction prices for a work by a living artist: US$58.4 million for Balloon Dog in 2013 and US$91.1 million for Rabbit in 2019.
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Jeff Koons was born in York, Pennsylvania, to Henry and Gloria Jeff Koons.
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Jeff Koons's father was a furniture dealer and interior decorator.
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When he was nine years old, his father would place old master paintings that Jeff Koons copied and signed in the window of his shop in an attempt to attract visitors.
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Jeff Koons studied painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
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Jeff Koons lived in Lakeview, and then in the Pilsen neighborhood at Halsted Street and 19th Street.
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Jeff Koons 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.
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Jeff Koons gained recognition in the 1980s and subsequently set up a factory-like studio in a SoHo loft on the corner of Houston Street and Broadway in New York.
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Jeff Koons used a color-by-numbers system, so that each of his assistants could execute his canvases and sculptures as if they had been done "by a single hand".
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Between 1977 and 1979 Jeff Koons produced four separate artworks, which he later referred to as Early Works.
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Jeff Koons first exhibited these pieces in the window of the New Museum in New York in 1980.
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Jeff Koons started creating sculptures using inflatable toys in the 1970s.
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The other objects of the series combine objects Jeff Koons found in souvenir shops and baroque imagery, thereby playing with the distinction between low art and high art.
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On May 15,2019, Jeff Koons set the record for most expensive piece sold by a living artist for the sale of "Rabbit".
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Turner Engine, is based on a commemorative, collectible in bottle in the form of a locomotive that was created by Jim Beam; however, Jeff Koons appropriated this model and had it cast in gleaming stainless-steel.
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Jeff Koons created an artificial and gleaming surface which represented a proletarian luxury.
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Jeff Koons issued Signature Plate, an edition for Parkett magazine, with a photographic decal in colors on a porcelain plate with gold-plated rim.
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In 1989 the Whitney Museum and its guest curator Marvin Heiferman asked Jeff Koons to make an artwork about the media on a billboard for the show "Image World: Art and Media Culture".
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Jeff Koons employed his then-wife Ilona Staller as a model in the shoot that formed the basis of the resulting work for the Whitney, Made in Heaven.
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Jeff Koons reportedly destroyed much of the work when Staller took their son Ludwig with her to Italy.
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Jeff Koons was not among the 44 American artists selected to exhibit their work in Documenta 9 in 1992, but was commissioned by three art dealers to create a piece for nearby Arolsen Castle in Bad Arolsen, Germany.
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Media mogul Peter Brant and his wife, model Stephanie Seymour, commissioned Jeff Koons to create a duplicate of the Bilbao statue Puppy for their Connecticut estate, the Brant Foundation Art Study Center.
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Jeff Koons' Celebration was to honor the ardently hoped-for return of Ludwig from Rome.
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Jeff Koons finally started to work on Balloon Flower in 1995.
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In 2006, Jeff Koons presented Hanging Heart, a 9-foot-tall highly polished, steel heart, one of a series of five differently colored examples, part of his Celebration series.
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In 2001, Jeff Koons undertook a series of paintings, Easyfun-Ethereal, using a collage approach that combined bikinis, food, and landscapes painted under his supervision by assistants.
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In 2000, Jeff Koons designed Split-Rocker, his second floral sculpture made of stainless steel, soil, geotextile fabric, and an internal irrigation system, which was first shown at the Palais des Papes in Avignon, France.
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Paintings and sculptures from the Popeye series, which Jeff Koons began in 2002, feature the cartoon figures of Popeye and Olive Oyl.
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Hulk Elvis is a work series by Jeff Koons created between 2004 and 2014.
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Jeff Koons perceives the series as "a bridge between East and West" since a parallel might be drawn between the comic book hero Hulk and Asian guardian Gods.
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In Ballerinas, Jeff Koons depicts figurines of dancers, derived from decorative porcelain works designed by Ukrainian artist Oksana Zhnikrup, at the imposing scale of classical sculpture.
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In June 2022, Dakis Jouannou comissioned Jeff Koons to create an artwork for his space at DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, on the Greek island of Hydra.
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Jeff Koons created the series Apollo, including a scuplture titled Apollo Wind Spinner, a 9.1 meter wide reflective wind spinner above the Slaughterhouse art space.
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In 2012, Jeff Koons bought Advanced Stone Technologies, an offshoot of the non-profit Johnson Atelier Technical Institute of Sculpture's stone division.
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The facility exists solely to fabricate Jeff Koons' works made of stone.
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In 2013 Jeff Koons created the sculpture Gazing Ball, which was inspired by the Farnese Hercules.
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In 1999 Jeff Koons commissioned a song about himself on Momus' album Stars Forever.
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In 2006 Jeff Koons appeared on Artstar, an unscripted television series set in the New York art world.
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Jeff Koons had a minor role in the 2008 film Milk playing state assemblyman Art Agnos.
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In late 2016 Jeff Koons unveiled plans for Bouquet of Tulips, an 11-meter high commemorative sculpture in Paris modelled on the Statue of Liberty, honoring the victims of the November 2015 attacks.
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In 2022 Jeff Koons announced that he would be sending artwork to the moon.
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Jeff Koons acted as curator of an Ed Paschke exhibition at Gagosian Gallery, New York, in 2009.
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Jeff Koons curated an exhibition in 2010 of works from the private collection of Greek billionaire Dakis Joannou at the New Museum in New York City.
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The exhibition, Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection, generated debate concerning cronyism within the art world as Jeff Koons is heavily collected by Joannou and had previously designed the exterior of Joannou's yacht Guilty.
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Jeff Koons was the artist named to design the seventeenth in the series of BMW "Art Cars".
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Jeff Koons's artwork was applied to a race-spec E92 BMW M3, and revealed to the public at The Pompidou Centre in Paris on June 2,2010.
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In 2013, Jeff Koons collaborated with American singer-songwriter and performance artist Lady Gaga for her third studio album, ARTPOP.
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From February 15 to March 6,2008, Jeff Koons donated a private tour of his studio to the Hereditary Disease Foundation for auction on Charitybuzz.
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Since a 1980 window installation at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, Jeff Koons' work has been widely exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions.
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Jeff Koons's Made in Heaven series was first shown at the Venice Biennale in 1990.
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In July 2009, Jeff Koons had his first major solo show in London, at the Serpentine Gallery.
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The Sculptor at the Liebieghaus in Frankfurt, the sculptures by Jeff Koons entered enter into dialogues with the historical building and a sculpture collection spanning five millennia.
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Jeff Koons received the BZ Cultural Award from a local Berlin newspaper in 2000 and the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture in 2001.
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Jeff Koons was named a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor in 2002 and then promoted to Officier in 2007.
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Jeff Koons received an honoroary doctorate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008.
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Jeff Koons was given the 2008 Wollaston Award from the Royal Academy of Arts in London.
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In 2014, Jeff Koons received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement presented by Awards Council member Wayne Thiebaud during the International Achievement Summit in San Francisco.
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Jeff Koons is widely collected in America and Europe, where some collectors acquire his work in depth.
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Jeff Koons has been represented by dealers such as Mary Boone, Sonnabend Gallery, Galerie Max Hetzler, Jerome de Noirmont and Gagosian Gallery.
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Many of Jeff Koons' works have been sold privately at auctions.
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Jeff Koons has caused controversy by the elevation of unashamed kitsch into the high-art arena, exploiting more throwaway subjects than, for example, Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans.
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Jeff Koons has the slimy assurance, the gross patter about transcendence through art, of a blow-dried Baptist selling swamp acres in Florida.
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Jeff Koons has influenced younger artists such as Damien Hirst, Jack Daws, Matthieu Laurette and Mona Hatoum.
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Jeff Koons has been sued several times for copyright infringement over his use of pre-existing images, the original works of others, in his work.
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Jeff Koons won one lawsuit, Blanch v Koons, No 03 Civ.
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The court ruled that Jeff Koons had sufficiently transformed the original advertisement so as to qualify as a fair use of the original image.
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In 2015, Jeff Koons faced allegations he used photographer Mitchel Gray's 1986 photo for Gordon's Gin in one of his Luxury and Degradation paintings without permission or compensation.
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Jeff Koons has accused others of copyright infringement, claiming that a bookstore in San Francisco infringed his copyright in Balloon Dogs by selling bookends in the shape of balloon dogs.
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Jeff Koons dropped the lawsuit after the bookstore's lawyer filed a motion for declaratory relief stating, "As virtually any clown can attest, no one owns the idea of making a balloon dog, and the shape created by twisting a balloon into a dog-like form is part of the public domain".
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Jeff Koons collaborated with Staller for the "Made in Heaven" paintings and sculptures in various media, with the hopes of making a film.
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The marriage ended soon afterward amid allegations that Jeff Koons had subjected Staller to physical and emotional abuse.
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Jeff Koons is currently married to Justine Wheeler, an artist and former employee who began working in Jeff Koons' studio in 1995.
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Jeff Koons donated $50,000 to Correct the Record, a Super PAC which supported Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign in June 2016.