Jeff Koons U.S.A., 1955
"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"
-Jeff Koons
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.
The artist is perhaps best known for his oversized sculptures of kitschy souvenirs, toys, and ornaments that are bright and shiny, as seen in his Celebration (1994-2011) series. With his choice of materials, Koons lends a heft and permanence to otherwise ephemeral items.
Born on January 21, 1955 in York, PA, the artist studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before moving to New York in the late 1970s, where he initially made a living as a stock broker on Wall Street. He rose to fame in the 1980s, developing iconic works such as Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988), the Made in Heaven (1990-1991) series, and Puppy (1992), which has been installed in Sydney Harbour, Bilbao, and the Palace of Versailles.
Koons' 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.
Since his first solo show in 1980, Koons's work has been widely exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions. Koons's exhibition history includes solo shows at the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, the Serpentine Gallery in London, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Château de Versailles in France. Koons's 2014 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art will be the last exhibition staged in the Marcel Breuer building on Mahattan's Upper East Side.
He currently lives and works in New York, NY.
