After graduating from high school, Jeff Koons enrolled at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, where he painted neo-surrealist dreamscapes heavily inspired by his hero Salvador Dali.
After graduating from high school, Jeff Koons enrolled at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, where he painted neo-surrealist dreamscapes heavily inspired by his hero Salvador Dali.
Jeff Koons is one of America’s most popular contemporary artists. His Neo-Pop aesthetics and wry appropriations of consumer objects, express a reverence for popular culture. Some of his art has consisted of overtly sexual themes while others have been seen as a form of neo-kitsch, such as his balloon dogs.
Background
Born in Pennsylvania on the first day of 1955, by the age of eight years old, Jeff Koons had begun creating replicas of Old Master paintings, which he signed 'Jeffrey Koons' and sold at his father's antique shop. His father Henry Koons was a furniture dealer and interior decorator; his mother Gloria, a housewife and seamstress. As a child he went door to door after school selling gift-wrapping paper and candy to earn pocket-money.
Education
After graduating from high school, Jeff Koons enrolled at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, where he painted neo-surrealist dreamscapes heavily inspired by his hero Salvador Dali. After studying under Paschke in Chicago for a year, Koons returned to the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1976. He was awarded an honorary degree from the Chicago Institute of Art some 30 years later.
In 1974, Koons viewed an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City by the Chicago Imagist Jim Nutt, which came to represent a watershed moment in his life and career. On the basis of that show, he transferred to Chicago, in order to work with Nutt and other Chicago Imagist teachers, among them Karl Wirsum and Ed Paschke.
In 1977, after graduating from college, Koons moved to Manhattan and took a job selling memberships at the Museum of Modern Art. In New York City, he explored the New Wave and Punk music scenes at the now legendary clubs CBGB and the Mudd Club, and mingled with David Salle and Julian Schnabel, slightly older artists with an established reputation in New York. It was during this period that he began producing the first inflatable sculptures, which would become a hallmark of his practice.
In 1980, Koons left MoMA and began selling stocks and mutual funds for the First Investors Corporation, building on his background in sales. This financed the body of work that would constitute “The New series.” In 1980, he debuted the series in the New Museum's storefront window on 14th Street in Lower Manhattan, which included three illuminated vacuum cleaners encased in plexiglass vitrines. Koons received almost instantaneous critical acclaim for his work. Only three years after this public debut, critic Roberta Smith declared him one of the strangest and most unique of contemporary artists.
“The New Series” garnered Koons significant critical attention throughout the early 1980s, but it was not until 1986 that he achieved major media traction, when he - along with fellow artists Peter Halley, Ashley Bickerton, and Meyer Vaisman - made the much publicized jump from International With Monument gallery to the esteemed Sonnabend Gallery, collectively acquiring the title "The Hot Four" on the cover of New York Magazine.
Two years later, Koons unveiled the Banality series which catapulted him to international fame. The series, featuring sculptural amalgamations of stuffed animals, plush toys, and magazine imagery among other inspirations, debuted nearly simultaneously at Sonnabend Gallery in New York, Max Hetzler in Cologne and Donald Young in Chicago. Having been featured in the pages of Time Magazine and on the cover of the Wall Street Journal, Koons' renown grew exponentially when, a year later, he released his most controversial series to date, “Made in Heaven”, consisting of monumental photographs depicting him nude and in sexually explicit acts with his then girlfriend, soon-to-be wife Ilona Staller, the famed Italian porn star also known as Ciccolina.
Brazenly flouting conventions of good taste, the series elicited an overwhelmingly condemnatory response from critics and the public alike, threatening to dethrone Koons from art world preeminence. Ultimately, however, “Made in Heaven” proved the adage that any publicity is good publicity. News from Missouri to Helsinki covered Koons' outrageous suite of pictures, and his subsequent engagement to Staller. Koons retained his title as a bona fide art star.
From then on Koons' reputation has continued to grow. Riding the wave of interest and rising values of contemporary art, his work in recent decades has explored themes related to sexuality, kitsch, celebrity, consumerism, and childhood. Series such as “Hulk Elvis”, “Gazing Ball”, and “Balloon Dog” resonate with critics and the public alike. He remains one of the most celebrated figures in contemporary art.
His career is fascinating to contrast with that of West Coast artist Mike Kelley, an artist who used similar materials, but whose sculptural experiments with stuffed animals, balloons, and other expressions of childhood merriment, are ultimately about dejection and angst. The influence of Koons is manifest in the work of a panoply of artists. Canonized figures such as Mike Kelley, and Isa Gentzken, and emerging art stars such as Darren Bader and Nick Darmstaedter are among those artists who have been impacted by his work.
In his ability to identify themes that resonate with and captivate the public, he is most comparable to Damien Hirst, his slightly younger contemporary whose art star status in England parallels Koons' in the U.S. Hirst's world-famous shark suspended in a tank of formaldehyde is especially indebted to Koon's early work. Koons' forays into advertising laid the groundwork for Hank Willis, who has delved more deeply into the racial implications of contemporary marketing imagery.
Always seeking new outlets for his creativity, in 2017, Koons teamed up with the luxury brand Louis Vuitton to produce an edition of bags printed with iconic European paintings. The artist’s works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, and the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam, among others. He currently lives and works in New York.
Jeff Koons derives inspiration from things people might find at a yard sale: inflatable plastic toys, vacuum cleaners, porcelain trinkets, and other items not typically considered fine art. In the rising economy of the 1980s, his message resonated with audiences sick of art world elitism. His outspoken distaste for abstract art, already fading from fashion, vaulted him into the limelight.
Quotations:
“I try to create work that doesn't make viewers feel they're being spoken down to, so they feel open participation.”
“I like to think that when you leave the room, the art leaves the room. Art is about your own possibilities as a human being. It’s about your own excitement, your own potential, and what you can become. It affirms your existence.”
Membership
Koons was elected as a Fellow to the American Academy for Arts and Sciences in 2005.
Personality
Koons is the anti-modernist, a shrewd, self-proclaimed crowd-pleaser, and avid promoter of his own work.
Quotes from others about the person
From the beginning of his controversial career, Koons overturned the traditional notion of art inside and out. Focusing on banal objects as models, he questioned standards of normative values in art, and, instead, embraced the vulnerabilities of aesthetic hierarchies and taste systems.
Interests
Artists
Salvador Dali
Connections
While a student at the Maryland College of Art, Koons conceived a daughter, Shannon Rodgers. Though he offered to marry the girl's mother, she felt that they were too young for the commitment, and the couple reluctantly put the child up for adoption. Shannon Rodgers reconnected with Koons in 1995.
In 1991, Jeff married Hungarian-born naturalized-Italian pornography star Cicciolina (Ilona Staller) who for five years pursued an alternate career as a member of the Italian parliament. In 1992, they had a son, Ludwig. The marriage ended soon afterward. They agreed to joint custody of the child, but Staller absconded from New York to Rome with the child, where mother and son remain.
A long custody battle ensued with the award of sole custody to Koons by the U.S. court in 1998, which had also dissolved the marriage. However, he ended up losing custody when the case went to Italy's Supreme Court. Koons is now married to Justine Wheeler, an artist and former employee who began working for Koons' studio in 1995.