Jeff Koons – who-aknew.com

Jeff Koons, born on January 21, 1955, in York, is an American sculptor, painter, photographer, and installation artist whose work draws on mass-produced objects, consumer culture, and erotic imagery. He trained at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he received his B.F.A. in 1976, and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His Celebration series, begun in 1994, features monumental mirror-polished stainless steel sculptures of party objects and developed into his most elaborate series to date. Until 2019, the studio he operated in Chelsea, New York, employed between 90 and 120 assistants working across a space of 1,500 square meters.

Key facts

Born: 21 January 1955
Birthplace: York
Country: United States
Occupation: sculptor; painter; photographer; installation artist
Field: erotic art
Education: Maryland Institute College of Art; School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Awards: Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Berliner Bär

Early Life and Education

As a teenager, he was so drawn to Salvador Dalí that he telephoned the New York hotel where Dalí was staying and was put through to him, ultimately meeting Dalí at the Knoedler Gallery to attend an exhibition of his work together.

At the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Koons came under the influence of Chicago painter Ed Paschke, whose use of popular imagery became an early source of inspiration for Koons’s own practice of borrowing from everyday commercial culture.

Financing an Art Career

To support his art practice in New York, Koons took two notably unconventional jobs. He sold memberships at the Museum of Modern Art, reportedly doubling the museum’s membership figures through his salesmanship. In 1980 he became licensed to sell mutual funds and stocks, working as a commodities broker at First Investors Corporation on Wall Street specifically to generate income for his studio work.

Major Series and Works

Koons held his first solo exhibition in 1980 at the New Museum in New York, where he showed works from The New series: vacuum cleaners and floor polishers displayed in clear Plexiglas vitrines.

The Banality series of 1988 was exhibited simultaneously at galleries in Cologne, New York, and Chicago. Among its works was the nearly life-size gilded porcelain sculpture Michael Jackson and Bubbles. That same year, String of Puppies sculptures from the series were shown, with three of the four copies selling to collectors for a total of $367,000.

The Celebration series, begun in 1994, started as a small calendar project before expanding into Koons’s most elaborate undertaking: monumental mirror-polished stainless steel sculptures of party objects. The Play-Doh sculpture, also begun in 1994, depicted a giant mound of colorful modeling clay rendered in polished aluminum. Getting a rigid metal to appear soft and malleable proved so technically demanding that the work was not completed until 2014, two decades after it was conceived.

Puppy, produced in 1992 and permanently installed at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, consists of a steel armature covered with approximately 38,000 natural plants. The plants are replaced twice a year as they stop flowering, and the full structure weighs 16 tons.

Legal Battles

In the copyright case Rogers v. Koons, decided in 1992, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that Koons had infringed photographer Art Rogers’s copyright in the photograph Puppies by creating the sculpture String of Puppies without authorization. After losing the case, Koons shipped his artist’s proof copy of the work to a museum in Germany nine days after a court injunction required him to surrender it.

Studio Practice

Until 2019, Koons ran a studio factory near the Hudson rail yards in Chelsea, New York, spanning 1,500 square meters (16,000 sq ft). Between 90 and 120 assistants worked there, producing his canvases and sculptures through a color-by-numbers system designed to ensure consistency across the entire output.

Major Exhibitions

In 2008, seventeen of Koons’s sculptures were installed in the Royal Apartments and gardens of the Château de Versailles for an exhibition titled Jeff Koons Versailles, which ran from September 10 to December 14, 2008.

The exhibition then traveled to the Centre Pompidou in Paris, where it ran from November 26, 2014, to April 27, 2015, before moving to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in June 2015.

Institutional Recognition and Collections

In 2017, Koons was appointed the first Artist-in-Residence at Columbia University’s Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute. His awards include a fellowship in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Berliner Bär.

His works are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Tate Modern in London, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among other major institutions.

Did you know

As a teenager, Koons admired Salvador Dalí so deeply that he telephoned the New York hotel where Dalí was staying, was connected to him, and the two subsequently met at the Knoedler Gallery to attend an exhibition of Dalí’s work together. (theartstory.org)
To fund his early art practice, Koons sold memberships at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and reportedly doubled the museum’s membership figures through his salesmanship. (yahoo.com)
When String of Puppies sculptures from the Banality series were exhibited in 1988, three of the four copies sold to collectors for a total of $367,000. After losing the Rogers v. Koons copyright case in 1992, Koons shipped his artist’s proof copy to a museum in Germany nine days after a court injunction required him to hand it over. (artistrights.info)
Puppy (1992), installed permanently at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, is covered with approximately 38,000 natural plants fixed to a steel structure. The plants are replaced twice a year as they stop flowering, and the complete sculpture weighs 16 tons. (flickr.com)
The Play-Doh sculpture, depicting a giant mound of colorful modeling clay rendered in polished aluminum, took 20 years to complete (1994–2014) because of the unprecedented technical difficulty of making a rigid metal look soft and malleable. (mimesisprojects.com)

Data sources

Data updated: 2026-10-28