Jeff Koons has created a fanciful and colorful environment of painted aluminum sculptures cast from inflatable toys, hanging stars made of fluorescent lights, comic-book style paintings, display cases filled with popcorn, and almost 100 inflated Hulk figures. Koons produced the current installation specifically for the Lever House Lobby.
Since his emergence in the 1980s Jeff Koons has blended the concerns and methods of Pop, Conceptual, and Appropriation art with craft-making and popular culture to create his own unique art iconography, often controversial and always engaging. Koons uses the languages of fine art, advertising, and entertainment, and collapses the barriers between high and low art to communicate his ideas. Just like Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol before him, his artwork is concerned with the conversion of everyday objects into art.
Koons is a self-proclaimed "idea man," who hires artisans and technicians to make the actual works. For him, the hand of the artist is not the important issue: "I'm basically the idea person. I'm not physically involved in the production. I don't have the necessary abilities, so I go to the top people..." In the sculptures for which he is best known, Koons borrows from advertisements, uses vacuum cleaners and basketballs, kitsch figurines and cartoon characters, and utilizes children's toys as subject matter. He often casts these common subjects in stainless steel, bronze, ceramic, porcelain, or aluminum, consequently elevating them to high-art status, and forcing us to reevaluate the way we view our daily surroundings.
Jeff Koons was born in York, Pennsylvania, in 1955, studied at Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore (B.F.A., 1976), and worked as a Wall Street commodities broker before embarking upon his career as an artist in the early 1980s. His work has been exhibited internationally and is included in major museum collections throughout the world. One of his most famous works, Puppy, a 43- foot tall topiary sculpture executed in a variety of flowers, was exhibited at Rockefeller Center in 2000. The artist lives and works in New York City.
Richard D. Marshall, Curator, Lever House Art Collection
Jeff Koons: Works in the Exhibition
CATERPILLAR LADDER, 2003
Polychromed aluminum, plastic and aluminum ladder.
Collection Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica, California
CHAINLINK, 2003
Polychromed aluminum and galvanized steel fence.
Collection Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica, California
DOGPOOL (PANTIES), 2003
Polychromed aluminum, glass, plexiglass, steel, vinyl, and
cibachrome photograph. Lever House Art Collection, New York
GEISHA, 2005
Digital acrylic lacquer on canvas. Courtesy of the artist
THE HULKS, 2005
Inflated plastic toy figures. Courtesy of the artist
MONKEYS (CHAIR), 2003
Polychromed aluminum, painted wood and straw chair.
Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York
ZEPPELIN (DOTS), 2005
Digital acrylic lacquer on canvas. Courtesy of the artist