Jeff Koons

Born in York, Pennsylvania, 1955, Jeff Koons’s highly successful career as an artist has focused on pop-art and consumer culture, appropriating “kitsch” into high art.
As a teenager he revered Salvador Dali, to the extent that he visited him at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City.  Koons studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Maryland Institute College of Art.  After college, he worked as a Wall Street commodities broker, while at the same time establishing himself as an artist.  He gained recognition in the 1980’s and set up a factory-like studio in a SoHo loft on the corner of Houston Street and Broadway in New York.  He employed over 30 assistants, producing art in a similar mode as Andy Warhol’s famous Factory.

Koons’s works have sold for astronomical prices at auctions and privately.  A small Koons Balloon Dog sold for $12,000 in auction last week.  In 2001, one of his three Michael Jackson and Bubbles porcelain sculptures sold for $5.6 million.  On November 14, 2007, a Hanging Heart, sculpture sold at Sotheby’s New York for $23.6 million becoming, at the time, the most expensive piece by a living artist ever auctioned.  In July 2008, his Balloon Flower (Magenta) also sold at Christie’s London for a record $25.7 million.