More About This Exhibition

Throughout his career Koons has made art that refers to the everyday world around him. With eyes wide open and embracing all of American culture as he looks for inspiration in today’s consumer world, he has appropriated everything from advertisements and vacuum cleaners to cartoon characters, collectibles, and plastic toys. His work owes a debt to Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades, which place decidedly nonartistic objects in an aesthetic context, and to Andy Warhol. Koons has often stated that he wishes his art to communicate with as broad an audience as possible. His work explores contemporary obsessions with sexuality and desire; race and gender; and celebrity, commerce, and the media. His choice of objects and images forcefully addresses the impact of class, power, materialism, and consumerism in contemporary life.

Born in York, Pennsylvania, in 1955 Koons painted copies of the Old Masters and sold them in the furniture store owned by his father, an interior decorator. In 1976 he graduated with a B.F.A. from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, having also studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago. He moved to New York in 1977 and worked at the Museum of Modern Art’s membership desk while beginning his career as an artist, creating works from plastic inflatable flowers, bunny rabbits, and mirrors. In 1980 Koons left MoMA and became a commodities trader in order to finance the work that would eventually appear in his series The New (1980–81): vacuum cleaners displayed in Plexiglas vitrines. Additional series would follow as Koons burst onto the contemporary art scene in the 1980s, achieving stardom and laying claim to a legacy of sensationalism and provocation. Among the most notable series are the Equilibrium sculptures (1985), basketballs floating in tanks of water; Luxury and Degradation (1986), focusing on the subject of consumer decadence; Statuary, large stainless-steel blowups of toys, including one of his most iconic works, Rabbit (1986); Banality (1988), which culminates in a porcelain sculpture of pop singer Michael Jackson and his pet chimpanzee Bubbles; fake advertisements that feature Koons himself; Made in Heaven (1990–91), in which the artist and his then-wife, Ilona Staller—a Hungarian-born member of the Italian parliament who, as Cicciolina, had achieved stardom in pornography—appear in flagrante delicto in a number of paintings and sculptures; and Celebration (1994–present), sculptures and paintings depicting toys and childhood themes blown up to fantastic proportions.

Koons has earned renown for public projects, beginning with the much-adored Puppy (1992), a 42 1/2-foot-tall topiary sculpture of a West Highland terrier executed in a variety of flowering plants on a steel substructure; Rabbit, a monumental helium-filled balloon that debuted in the 2007 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York; and Train, a 160-foot-tall work in progress in which a full-scale steam locomotive is to be suspended nose-down from a Liebherr crane and perform several times a day—wheels accelerating while chugging, emitting steam, and blasting its whistle. Koons’s most recent paintings are complicated combinations of recognizable icons interwoven with the themes that are his particular passions: sexuality, gender, breathing, life, and death.

Since the 1990s Koons has operated a factory-like studio in New York, employing a large staff assigned to different aspects of producing his work—similar to Andy Warhol’s Factory or to Renaissance workshops. His current studio, a 27,500-square-foot former courier facility, employs about ninety-five people and operates at a beehive level of activity. It is there that Koons oversees the artisans and technicians who make the actual works: models for sculpture, smaller sculptures, and paintings. His large-scale works are produced off-site by metal fabricators and at foundries.

The three sculptures featured on the Roof Garden are from the Celebration series, which Koons began working on in 1993. Balloon Dog (Yellow) is based on balloons twisted into the shape of a toy dog. Standing more than ten feet tall, its highly reflective and brightly colored surface gives the appearance of an actual balloon in a form that would delight a child but would also fascinate any student of Freud. A page from a Winnie the Pooh coloring book featuring Pooh’s companion Piglet was the genesis of Coloring Book. Koons took a magic marker to the page and colored in various zones; in the fabrication of the sculpture, he removed Piglet from the composition, which resulted in this abstraction rendered in cheerful pastel colors. Sacred Heart (Red/Gold), with its sumptuous surfaces of wrapping and ribbon, may suggest childhood—as well as adult—dreams and fantasies about candy and luxury goods, intermixed with the potent Roman Catholic image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. As a group, the three colorful Pop sculptures are characteristic of the artist’s work over the years, offering a certain jouissance and jubilant spirit and demonstrating extraordinary technical virtuosity in the rendering of large perfected forms on a huge scale.

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