Jeff Koons is one of the most influential, prominent and controversial American contemporary artists of the postwar era, best known for sculptures of popular culture icons. Born in 1955 in York, Pennsylvania, Koons received his BFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and later studied at the School of Art Institute of Chicago. Koons rose to prominence in the 1980s by rejecting abstract art elitism and exploring the meaning of art in a media-saturated era.

Koon’s oeuvre explores commercialism, Pop aesthetic, advertisements and the concept of the readymade. He addresses issues of taste, pleasure, celebrity and commerce by raising popular culture and banal items to the realm of high art. The release of his Banality series in the late 1980s catapulted him to international fame, as it tested the boundaries between art and mass culture. Koons continued to reproduce objects and toys, such as the famous Balloon Dog, Rabbit and Puppy, in stainless steel with mirrored surfaces. Jeff Koons is a controversial artist, seen as pioneering but also viewed as kitsch and crass.

Today, Koons maintains a factory in Chelsea, New York City, where 90-120 assistants, artisans and technicians make the actual work for Koons’ under instruction. Modeled like Andy Warhol’s factory, the hand of the artist isn’t important to Koons, once explaining “Art is really just communication of something and the more archetypal it is, the more communicative it is.”

Jeff Koons has exhibited at prominent museums and galleries worldwide, including the Whitney Museum in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. His work has been featured in public installations at Rockefeller Center and permanently installed at the Guggenheim Bilbao.