Jeff Koons was born on January 21, 1955 in York, Pennsylvania; as a teenager he revered

Salvador Dal, to the extent of visiting him in the Plaza Hotel. Koons attended the School of
the Art Institute of Chicago and the Maryland Institute College of Art, and studied painting.
After college he worked as a Wall Street commodities broker, whilst establishing himself as
an artist. He gained recognition in the 1980s, and subsequently set up a factory-like studio in
a Soho loft on the corner of Houston and Broadway in New York. This had over 30 staff, each
assigned to a different aspect of producing his work in a similar mode to Andy Warhol's
Factory.
Koons' early work was in the form of conceptual sculpture, one of the best-known being Two
Ball 50/50 Tank, 1985, consisting of two basket balls floating in water, which half-fills a
glass tank. (The influence onDamien Hirst's later work The Physical Impossibility of Death in
the Mind of Someone Living, a shark suspended in formaldehyde in a glass tank, is
unmistakable.)
Koons then moved on to "Statuary", the large stainless-steel blowups of toys, and then a
series "Banality", which culminated in 1988 with Michael Jackson and Bubbles, stated to be
the world's largest ceramic, a life-size gold-leaf plated statue of the sitting singer cuddling
Bubbles, his pet chimpanzee. (Three years later it sold at Sotheby's New York as Lot 7655 for
$5,600,000, trebling Koons' previous sale record.)
In 1991 he married Hungarian-born naturalized-Italian porn star La Cicciolina, aka Ilona
Staller, who for five years (1987-92) pursued an alternate career as a member of the Italian
parliament. His "Made in Heaven" series of paintings, photos and sculptures portrayed the
couple in explicit sexual positions and created even more controversy than he had before.
In 1992 they had a son Ludwig; the marriage ended soon after. They agreed joint custody but
Staller absconded from New York to Rome with the child, where mother and son remain,
despite the award in 1998 of sole custody to Koons by the US courts, which had dissolved the
marriage. In the aftermath he stated: "That experience really gave me a sense of responsibility
to the public. I was losing my sense of humanity. Now, every day, I feel more and more
responsible in the act of communicating and sharing and really trying to be as generous as
possible as an artist."
In 1992, to create a piece for an art exhibition in Bad Arolsen, Germany. The result was
Puppy, a forty-three feet (thirteen meter) tall topiary sculpture of a West Highland White
Terrier puppy executed in a variety of flowers on a steel substructure. In 1995 the sculpture
was dismantled and re-erected in Sydney Harbor on a new, more permanent, stainless
steel armature with an internal irrigation system.
In 1997 the piece was purchased by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and installed on
the terrace outside the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Before the dedication at the museum, a
trio disguised as gardeners attempted to plant explosive-filled flowerpots near the
sculpture [1], but were foiled by Bilbao police. Since its installation, Puppy has become a
noted icon for the city of Bilbao. In the summer of 2000 it travelled toNew York City for a
temporary exhibition at Rockefeller Center.
In 2001 he concentrated on painting in a series "Easyfun--Ethereal", a collage approach
incorporating bikinis (with the bodies wearing them removed), food and landscape - painted

under his perfectionist supervision by assistants. And In 2005 he was elected as a Fellow to
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Koons' work is classified as Neo-Pop or Post-Pop, as part of an 80s movement in reaction to
the pared-down art of Minimalism and Conceptualism in the previous decade. Although the
use of commercial imagery is a starting point, some also see the incorporation of some of the
Conceptual approach which implies an irony. Koons denies this: "A viewer might at first see
irony in my work... but I see none at all. Irony causes too much critical contemplation,"
(which in turn might well be perceived as an ironic double bluff).
Koons entitled Celebration, to honor the ardently hoped-for return of Ludwig from Rome.
Consists of a series of large-scale sculptures and paintings of, among others balloon dogs,
Valentine hearts, diamonds, and Easter eggs, was conceived in 1994. Some of the pieces are
still being fabricated. Each of the 20 different sculptures in the series comes in five
differently colored unique versions, including the artist's cracked Egg (Blue) won the 2008
Charles Wollaston Award for the most distinguished work in the Royal Academy's Summer
Exhibition. The Diamond pieces were created between 1994 and 2005, made of shiny
stainless steel seven-feet wide. Created in an edition of five versions, his later
work Tulips (19952004) consists of a bouquet of multicolor balloon flowers blown up to
gargantuan proportions (more than 2 m (6.6 ft) tall and 5 m (16 ft) across). Koons finally
started to work on Balloon Flower in 1995.
Koons was pushing to finish the series in time for a 1996 exhibition at the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum in New York, but the show was ultimately canceled because of
production delays and cost overruns. When "Celebration" funding ran out, the staff was laid
off, leaving a skeleton crew of two: Gary McCraw, Koons's studio manager, who had been
with him since 1990, and Justine Wheeler, an artist from South Africa, who had arrived in
1995 and eventually took charge of the sculpture operation. The artist convinced his primary
collectors Dakis Joannou, Peter Brant, and Eli Broad, along with dealers Jeffrey
Deitch, Anthony d'Offay, and Max Hetzler, to invest heavily in the costly fabrication of
the Celebration series at Arnold, a Frankfurt-based company. The dealers funded the project
in part by selling works to collectors before they were fabricated. In 1999, his 1988 "Pink
Panther" sculpture sold at auction for $1.8 million, and he returned to the Sonnabend gallery.
Well aware of Koons's bottomless needs and demands, Ileana Sonnabend and Antonio
Homem, her gallery director and adopted son, nevertheless welcomed him back; in all
likelihood they sensed (correctly, it turned out) that he was poised for a glorious second act
something that only he, among his generation of overpublicized artists, has so far managed to
pull off. Koons, however, no longer confines himself to a single gallery. Larry Gagosian, the
colossus of New York dealers, agreed to finance the completion of all the unfinished
"Celebration" work, in exchange for exclusive rights to sell it.
In 2006, Koons presented Hanging Heart, a 9 feet tall highly polished, steel heart, one of a
series of five differently colored examples, part of his Celebration series. Large sculptures
from that series were exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2008.

Later additions to the series include Balloon Swan (20042011), an 11.5-foot (3.5-metre),
stainless-steel bird, Balloon Rabbit (20052010), and Balloon Monkey, all for which
childrens party favors are reconceived as mesmerizing monumental forms.
The series also includes, in addition to sculptures, sixteen oil paintings.

Koons has received extreme reactions to his work. Supporters claim (for Balloon Dog) "an
awesome presence... a massive durable monument" (Amy Dempsey, ed. Styles, Schools and
Movements, 2002, Thames & Hudson), and for other work that they are "wowed by the
technical virtuosity and eye-popping visual blast" (Jerry Saltz, art critic for the Village Voice).
However, Mark Stevens of The New Republic dismissed him as a "decadent artist who lacks
the imaginative will to do more than trivialize and italicise his themes and the tradition in
which he works... He is another of those who serve the tacky rich." Michael Kimmelman
of The New York Times saw "one last, pathetic gasp of the sort of self-promoting hype and
sensationalism that characterized the worst of the 1980s" and threw in for good measure
"artificial," "cheap" and "unabashedly cynical".
Whether Koons will be seen in time as a critical commentator in the tradition of
the Dadaists and a genuine leader in the controversial tradition of the avant-garde, or merely
as a fashionable purveyor of meaninglessness and banality, remains to be seen. However, this
judgement cannot be made in isolation from the evaluation of the wider contemporary art
scene. He has had an undoubted influence on noted younger artists: his extreme enlargement
of mundane objects has been copied by Damien Hirst (e.g. in Hirst's Hymn, an eighteen-foot
version of a fourteen-inch anatomical toy) and Mona Hatoum amongst others.
Even a cursory study of history shows that contemporary institutional acceptance (his work
has been exhibited in London's Royal Academy) is no reliable guide to the judgement of
posterity. What can be said is that at the moment Koons attracts extremes of enthusiasm and
vitriol, and that his work is amongst the most expensive in the world.