Jeff Koons (born 1955) playfully tests the boundaries of commerce, celebrity, banality, and pleasure. He rose to prominence in the mid-1980s as part of a generation of artists who explored the meaning of art in a media-saturated era. Koons turns banal commercial or everyday objects into art icons by using seductive materials, a shift of scale, and a contextual displacement. Jeff Koons’s “Balloon Dog” (featuring his enormous iconic chromium stainless steel dogs); his large-scale vinyl “Inflatables”; or the giant “Split-Rocker” all follow this principle. For instance, Jeff Koons in “Puppy” engaged the past and the present, referencing the eighteenth-century formal garden, while adding the most sugary of iconography. Originally licensed as a commodities broker, Koons decided to become an artist in the late 1970s and moved from Wall Street into a factory-like studio in SoHo with hundreds of assistants. Since then, he has produced different iconic series, like the “Pre-New”, a series of domestic objects in strange new configurations, and “The Equilibrium” series, consisting of basketballs floating in distilled water tanks. The “Banality” series, which includes Jeff Koons´s “Michael Jackson and Bubbles” and “Woman in Tub”, among others, is characterized by oddly eroticized, comic, and kitsch images. However, it is indeed Koons’s “Made in Heaven” series that is his most provocative and controversial work, in which he examines the place of sexuality in visual culture. Koons is widely regarded as one of the most important, influential, and controversial contemporary artists. He constantly tests the boundaries between art and commerce, high culture and mass culture, ready-made and art objects, by decontextualizing his objects and lifting them to iconic status. Jeff Koons´s art is the result of his intention to bring it out of the enclave of the genius-driven artist into the realms of contemporary pop and commerce-driven culture.

Jeff Koons

One of the most famous artists working today, Jeff Koons makes gleeful, tongue-in-cheek sculptures, paintings, and installations that border—and often cross—the edge of good taste.

https://data.wengcontemporary.com/media/Jeff_Koons_Balloon_Dog_Blue_Content_Sheet_NEW_BRANDING.pdf

This most iconic artwork series of the 21st century is a reproduction of the larger sculpture of the Balloon Dog from the Celebration series (1994-2000), as conceived in five unique colours (Blue, Magenta, Yellow, Orange, Red).The magic attraction of Balloon Dog lies in its ability to convey charm, power and material precision at once. Its equestrian shape resembles the heroic statuary trope that populates public spaces across the globe. Koons himself called this piece the "Trojan horse“ of the Celebration series.The Balloon Dog has chameleon-like qualities; its reflective surface is capable of physically changing with its surroundings and its many-layered meanings make it conceptually change in the mind of each viewer.The production of this artwork requires 60 people and takes a full month to complete. Its fashioning combines traditional porcelain decoration techniques with new technologies which are not typically applied to ceramics; this combination allows to achieve its specific metallic and reflective characteristics.Each piece is signed on the inside front right leg and the signature is applied on top of the porcelain and fired in the oven.

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“ (...) The only thing the artist can do is be honest with themselves and make the art they want to make. That’s what I’ve always done. „

—Jeff Koons