Jeff Koons

Born in 1955 in York, Pennsylvania, American artist and brilliant self-promoter, Jeff Koons is known for his conceptual sculpture pieces that transform banal kitsch items into objects of high art.
At the age of eight, he painted copies of Old Master paintings, signed them Jeffrey Koons,and sold them at his father furniture store.
(source-www.guggenheimcollection.org)
As a boy, Koons revered Salvador Dali and endeavoured to meet the artist;
‘I met him at the Saint Regis Hotel when I was a teenager. He took me to an exhibition of his and he posed for some photos in front of “The Hallucinogenic Toreador”. I now own the gouache study of that work and it hangs in my bedroom'.
(Interview with Ossian Ward, TimeOut Magazine, July 2009).

In 1972 Koons studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago and received a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, and honorary doctorates from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Corcoran College of Art + Design in Washington, D.C. 1976.
In 1977, he moved to New York and began working at the membership desk of the Museum of Modern Art, where he quickly gained a reputation as and excellent and somewhat flamboyant salesman. It was his interest in 'consumerism' that led him to create mass produced garish inflatable flowers and rabbits, combining them with plastic, Plexiglas, and mirrors to produce sculptures. In 1980, Koons left the museum and began selling mutual funds and stocks at First Investors Corporation to finance the work that would eventually appear in his The New series (1980-83) where Koons expanded the ideas of the early Pop artists of the 1960s taking everyday objects such as Vacuum cleaners and encasing them in vitrines, ascribing them status as art objects.
At this time Koons had set himself up with a warehouse loft in SoHo and employed approximately 30 assistants to create work to his specifications. Now it is said he employs up to 120 assistants to create his art pieces.
It was in the 1980s Jeff Koons attained a "star" pop status rivaling his precursor Pop Artist, Andy Warhol.
Koons's created a forty-one-inch-high stainless-steel Rabbit in 1986 and during this same year, Koons introduced the subject of consumerist decadence in his work, producing sculptural works such as the pop singer Michael Jackson and his pet chimpanzee ( Bubbles);
'I wanted to show Michael as a contemporary Christ figure: I wanted to give the viewer a sense of a spiritual authority' (Interview by Farah Nayeri - June 30, 2009).
This series also included ads, starring Koons himself, that played on his newfound art-world celebrity.
' I was trying to compete as a cultural identity with the Hollywood system' (Jeff Koons talks to Katy Siegel, Interview,Artforum, March 2003).
This use of his own image morphed into the Made in Heaven series (1990-91), first shown at the 1990 Venice Biennale, where Koons celebrated, in explicit sexual terms, his union with wife Ilona Staller, the Italian porn star and politician known as La Cicciolina.

In 1992, Koons created ‘Puppy’, a temporary sculpture nearly twelve metres high, modelled on the ‘White Terrier’, covered in a coat of thousands of flowering plants. This work is now permanantly located at the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain. During its installation there was an attempt to destroy the piece by extremist group, Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) but was foiled by Basque police officer Jose María Aguirre, who then was shot dead by ETA members (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Koons#cite_note-9).
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In 2009, Koon's held his first solo show in London with a series of large scale works based on the subject and iconic figure of Popeye. In 2010, BMW released the Koon's designed 'art-car'. The Koons car number, “79”, pays tribute to the 1979 Andy Warhol car. The Warhol car was assigned the number “76,” an homage to the 1976 Frank Stella car, both of which raced at Le Mans. The home of all BMW Art Cars is the BMW Museum in Munich. In September 2010, Koons’ 17th BMW Art Car was presented there together with some of its predecessors.

Koons became the world’s most expensive living artist in November 2007 when his sculpture “Hanging Heart (Magenta/Gold)” (1994-2006) fetched $23.6 million at auction in New York. He has been overtaken since by Lucian Freud.

Since his first solo show in 1980, Koons' work has been widely exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions. Recent solo shows include the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli (2003), the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo (2004), which traveled to the Helsinki City Art Museum (2005); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2008); "Jeff Koons: Versailles", Chateâu de Versailles, France (2008-2009). In 2009 alone, Koons had four major solo exhibitions in public institutions: the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the rooftop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; and the Serpentine Gallery, London. Among the awards he has received are Officer of the French Legion of Honor; the Artistic Achievement Award from Americans for the Arts; and the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture. Koons lives and works in New York City.

http:/www.jeffkoons.com/

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