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Jeff Koons (born January 21 1955) is an American artist whose work incorporates kitsch imagery using painting, sculpture, and other forms, often in large scale.
s was born in York, Pennsylvania; as a teenager he revered Salvador Dalí, to the extent of visiting him at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City. Koons studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Maryland Institute College of Art.
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Quotations
Abstraction and luxury are the guard dogs of the upper class.
Art to me is a humanitarian act and I believe that there is a responsibility that art should somehow be able to affect mankind, to make the world a better place.
Encyclopedia
Jeff Koons (born January 21 1955) is an American artist whose work incorporates kitsch imagery using painting, sculpture, and other forms, often in large scale.
Life and art
Early life and work
Koons was born in York, Pennsylvania; as a teenager he revered Salvador Dalí, to the extent of visiting him at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City. Koons studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Maryland Institute College of Art. After college, he worked as a Wall Street commodities broker while 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. It was staffed with over 30 assistants, each assigned to a different aspect of producing his work—in a similar mode to Andy Warhol's Factory and the studio of Damien Hirst.
Koons's early work was in the form of conceptual sculpture, an example of which is Three Ball 50/50 Tank (1985), consisting of three basket balls floating in distilled water that half-fills a glass tank.
Arts journalist Arifa Akbar reported for The Independent that in “an era when artists were not regarded as ‘stars’, Koons went to great lengths to cultivate his public persona by employing an image consultant." Featuring photographs by Matt Chedgey, Koons placed "advertisements in international art magazines of himself surrounded by the trappings of success” and gave interviews “referring to himself in the third person.”
Koons then moved on to Statuary, the large stainless-steel blowups of toys, followed by the Banality series that culminated in 1988 with Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 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 for $5.6 million and is now in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The statue was included in a 2004 retrospective at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo which traveled a year later to the Helsinki City Art Museum. It also featured in his second retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in 2008.
Marriage 1991
In 1991, he married Hungarian-born naturalized-Italian porn star Cicciolina (Ilona Staller) who for five years (1987–1992) 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.
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 2008, Staller filed suit against Koons for failing to pay child support.
Puppy 1992
During this time, he was commissioned in 1992 to create a piece for an art exhibition in Bad Arolsen, Germany. The result was Puppy, a forty-three foot (12.4 m) 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 at the Museum of Contemporary Art on Sydney Harbour on a new, more permanent, stainless steel armature with an internal irrigation system.
The piece was purchased in 1997 by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and installed on the terrace outside the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain. Before the dedication at the museum, a ETA trio disguised as gardeners attempted to plant explosive-filled flowerpots near the sculpture but were foiled by Basque police officer Jose María Aguirre, who was then shot dead by ETA members. Currently the square the statue is placed in bears the name of Aguirre. In the summer of 2000, the artwork travelled to New York City for a temporary exhibition at Rockefeller Center.
Media mogul Peter Brant and his wife, model Stephanie Seymour, have an exact Jeff Koons duplicate of the Bilbao statue on the grounds of their Connecticut estate.
Recent work
In 1999, Koons commissioned a song about himself on Momus' album Stars Forever.
In 2001, he undertook a series of paintings titled Easyfun-Ethereal, using a collage approach that combined bikinis (with the bodies removed), food, and landscapes painted under his supervision by assistants.
In 2006, he appeared on Artstar, an unscripted television series set in the New York art world and from February 15 to March 6, 2008, he donated a private tour of his studio to the Hereditary Disease Foundation for auction on charitybuzz.com.
On November 14 2007, his sculpture Hanging Heart sold at Sotheby's New York for $23.6 million becoming, at the time, the most expensive piece by a living artist ever auctioned. It was bought by the Gagosian Gallery in New York which also purchased another Koons sculpture entitled "Diamond (Blue)" for $11.8 million from Christie's London on November 13, 2007. In July 2008, his Balloon Flower (Magenta) also sold at Christie’s London for a record $25.7 million.
Other large sculptures from his Celebration series were exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2008.
He conceived a drawing similar to his Tulip Balloons for placement on the front page of the Internet search engine Google. The drawing greeted all who visited Google's main page on April 30 2008 and May 1 2008.
Cracked Egg (Blue) won the 2008 Charles Wollaston Award for the most distinguished work in the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition.
Considered as his first retrospective in France, the 2008 exhibition of seventeen Koons sculptures at the Chateau de Versailles also marked the first ambitious display of a contemporary American artist organized by the chateau. The New York Times reported that “several dozen people demonstrated outside the palace gates” in a protest arranged by a little-known, right-wing group dedicated to French artistic purity.
Koons had a minor role in the 2008 film Milk (film) playing state assemblyman Art Agnos.
Classification
Among curators and art collectors and others in the art world Koons's work is labeled 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. Koons resists such comments: "A viewer might at first see irony in my work... but I see none at all. Irony causes too much critical contemplation." Koon's crucial point is to reject any hidden meaning in his artwork. The meaning is only what one perceives at first glance; there is no gap between what the work is in itself and what is perceived.
He has caused controversy by the elevation of unashamed kitsch into the high art arena, exploiting more throwaway subjects than, for example, Warhol's soup cans. His work Balloon Dog (1994-2000) is based on balloons twisted into shape to make a toy dog.
His sculpture differs in two major respects to the original:
- it is made of metal (painted bright red to give the appearance of balloons),
- it is more than ten feet (three metres) tall.
Evaluation and Influence
Koons has received extreme reactions to his work. Critic Amy Dempsey described his Balloon Dog as "an awesome presence... a massive durable monument." Jerry Saltz at artnet.com enthused that it was possible to be "wowed by the technical virtuosity and eye-popping visual blast" of Koons's art.
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 called Koons's work "artificial," "cheap" and "unabashedly cynical."
In an article comparing the contemporary art scene with show business, renowned critic Robert Hughes wrote that Koons is “an extreme and self-satisfied manifestation of the sanctimony that attaches to big bucks. Koons really does think he's Michelangelo and is not shy to say so. The significant thing is that there are collectors, especially in America, who believe it. He has the slimy assurance, the gross patter about transcendence through art, of a blow-dried Baptist selling swamp acres in Florida. And the result is that you can't imagine America's singularly depraved culture without him.”
To the question - “Is it important that your work be famous?” - Koons replied: "There’s a difference between being famous and being significant. I’m interested in [my work's] significance — anything that can enrich our lives and make them vaster — but I’m really not interested in the idea of fame for fame’s sake."
He has influenced younger artists such as Damien Hirst (e.g. in Hirst's Hymn, an eighteen-foot version of a fourteen-inch anatomical toy), and Mona Hatoum. In turn, his extreme enlargement of mundane objects owes a debt to Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Much of his work was also influenced by artists working in Chicago during his study at the Art Institute, including Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke and H. C. Westermann.
In 2005, he was elected as a Fellow to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Copyright litigation
Koons has been sued several times for copyright infringement over his use of pre-existing images in his work. In Rogers v. Koons, 960 F.2d 301 (2d Cir. 1992), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld a judgment against him for his use of a photograph of puppies as the basis for a sculpture, String of Puppies.
Koons also lost lawsuits in United Features Syndicate, Inc. v. Koons, 817 F. Supp. 370 (S.D.N.Y. 1993), and Campbell v. Koons, No. 91 Civ. 6055, 1993 WL 97381 (S.D.N.Y. Apr. 1, 1993). More recently, he won a lawsuit in Blanch v. Koons, No. 03 Civ. 8026 (LLS), S.D.N.Y., Nov. 1 2005 (slip op.), affirmed by the Second Circuit in October, 2006, brought over his use of a photographic advertisement as source material for legs and feet in a painting, Niagara (2000). The court ruled that Koons had sufficiently transformed the original advertisement so as to qualify as a fair use.
Sources
Print
Online
Film and video
- Jeff Koons: the Banality Work by Jeff Koons, Paul Tschinkel, Sarah Berry. Videorecording produced by Inner Tube Video and Sonnabend Gallery (New York, NY), 1990.
External links
- by Klaus Ottmann
- Short essay by Morgan Meis of
- (video)
- (photos)
- Analysis of Koon's "Celebration" paintings
- Video at VernissageTV
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