JEFF KOONS

 

 

My work has no aesthetic value, other than the aesthetics of communication. (J. Koons, 1992)

 

Born in York, Pennsylvania, on January 21, 1955. Encouraged by his parents, he took private painting lessons and helped his father by preparing the displays in his furniture store. From 1975 to 1976 he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he became the assistant of the painter Ed Pasche, then at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, graduating in 1976. The following year he moved to New York, moving towards a more conceptual approach and developing an interest in the work of artists such as Robert Smithson and Martin Kippenberger. Before embarking on an artistic career he worked at the MoMA and as a commodities broker. His first opportunity came in 1980, when he exhibited an installation of vacuums, The New, in the window of the New Museum at its old Broadway premises, evoking Andy Warhol’s installation in the windows of the Bonwit Teller department store in New York in 1961. His first solo exhibition (Equilibrium) was held in 1985 at the International with Monument Gallery in East Village. In 1986 the group of artists close to the gallery (Halley, Koons, Vaisman and Bickerton) exhibited at Ileana Sonnabend’s gallery. From this time Koons’s career had an upsurge, with increasingly frequent visits to Europe and ever more numerous exhibitions there. By renewing and developing the legacy of the Duchampian readymade and the Dadaist provocations, as well as drawing on Pop Art and the achievement of Warhol, in his sculptures and installations Koons reflected on the capitalist dynamic of a Western society dominated by advertising images and commodities. To achieve this he did not hesitate to use marketing strategies to promote his art. Above all he did not depend on a single dealer. He involved other people in the production of his works to fund or sponsor them, including major collectors. At the 44th Venice Biennale in 1990 he did not hesitate to display a series of posters depicting himself with his wife Ilona Staller in erotic positions. In 1992 he had his first retrospective with a traveling exhibition at leading museums in America and Europe, such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center of Minneapolis, the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam, the Aarhus Kunstmuseum in Denmark and the Staatsgalerie of Stuttgart. In the same year Koon produced one of the most popular images of his career: Puppy, a West Highland White Terrier thirteen meters high which could hold 70,000 flowers. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation acquired it in 1997 and exhibits it permanently in front of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. A versatile artist, capable of expressing himself through a broad range of techniques and materials, he transformed knickknacks, toys and everyday objects from different periods of Western art into epiphanies of consumerism. In 2001, the then President of the French Republic Jacques Chirac named him Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur. In the following years he made forays into the field of design: from a T-shirt for the Gap to an extra-lux yacht-gallery. In 2008 he played the part of Art Agnos in the film Milk by Gus Van Sant. He lives and works in New York.