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_The_Diamonds_Content_sheet_2024__NEW_BRANDING_0Kz2H1v.pdf

The Greeks believed that diamonds were the tears of gods, and the Romans wrote about Cupid’s arrows being diamond-tipped. This is how this precious gemstone became a gesture of love and a social symbol of affluence. Especially since the red diamonds are the rarest and most expensive, they are the most coveted.

With this festive Diamond in red colour, Koons offers a reimagined iconography of the gemstone found in nature, which takes billions of years to form. He first started working with the image of the Diamond in 1994 as part of his Celebration series. Thereafter, the Diamond became a vehicle for Koons to communicate and reflect upon the mass-made consumer products that are created for festivities.

The American artist stated: "I don´t care about money. I´m interested in people, human desire, and aspiration.”

This is why it is presented in the company of four gleaming golden settings at its corners, embracing the gemstone from every angle to keep it safe and in place, as a warm motherly figure.

Koons elaborated: “It’s not about bling, but it’s about the moment of creation. The posts on the sides of the diamond represent male energy, and the diamond is an egg. The stone is attached to a ring by four prongs. For me, the prongs are like sperm attacking an ovum, in the process of being fertilized. That represents the truest narrative we have of human history, which are our genes and our DNA."

With this technically challenging edition, Koons stretched the capabilities of the Limoges porcelain practice for this limited edition. Characteristic of his works, they share a deliberate mirroring effect of its environment, and that of the viewer - one cannot see the artwork without seeing oneself and as the artist has said, "If you don't move nothing happens."

Show all results

“ Everything is a metaphor at the end of the day - we don't care about objects we care about people - and all objects and images are metaphors for ourselves and other people. „

—Jeff Koons