"Stacked"
Photolithograph
2003
33 1/2"H x 23"W
(c) Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons Biography
Jeff Koons was born in York, Pennsylvania; as a teenager he revered Salvador Dalí, to the extent of visiting him in the Plaza Hotel. Koons attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Maryland Institute College of Art, and studied painting. After college he worked as a Wall Street commodities broker, whilst 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. This had over 30 staff, each assigned to a different aspect of producing his work-in a similar mode to both Andy Warhol's Factory and many Renaissance artists.

Koons' early work was in the form of conceptual sculpture, one of the best-known being Three Ball 50/50 Tank, 1985, consisting of three basket balls floating in water, which half-fills a glass tank. The influence on Damien Hirst's later work The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living-a shark suspended in formaldehyde in a glass tank-is unmistakable.

Koons then moved on to "Statuary", the large stainless-steel blowups of toys, and then a series "Banality", which culminated in 1988 with Michael Jackson and Bubbles-stated to be the world's largest ceramic-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 as Lot 7655 for $5,600,000, trebling Koons' previous sale record. The statue was in 2002 acquired by the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Contemporary Art in Oslo, Norway, and can now be exhibited there.

Recent work
In 1999 he commissioned a song about himself, on Momus' album Stars Forever.

In 2001 he concentrated on painting in a series "Easyfun--Ethereal", a collage approach incorporating bikinis (with the bodies wearing them removed), food and landscape - painted under his perfectionist supervision by assistants.

In 2005 he was elected as a Fellow to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 2006 he appeared on Artstar, an unscripted television series set in the New York art world.