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_NEW_BRANDING_PWeRZUp.pdf

We are delighted to offer you a unique set of only 99 conceived matching edition numbers from Jeff Koons's limited art editions of the "Balloon Dog (Blue)" created in 2021 from the edition of 799 pieces and the festive "Diamond (Red)", created in 2020 from an edition number of 599. Both works are part of the American artist's "Celebration" series, which Koons started in 1994. The series evolved from Koons's desire to recreate the ecstatic experiences in one's life such as birthday parties and festive events, hence the "Balloon Dog (Blue)" that a clown would create at a memorable child's party and the "Diamond (Red)" symbolising an engagement ring.

These two limited art editions are labouriously created out of Limoges porcelain with chromatic coating, which gives them chameleon-like qualities; their reflective surfaces are capable of physically changing with its surroundings and its many-layered meanings make these works conceptually change in the mind of each viewer.

Each edition is signed and numbered and the works from this set share the same edition numbers, which makes them a rare and desirable collectible.

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“ One of the things that I’m most proud of is making work that lets viewers not feel intimidated by art, but feel that they can emotionally participate in it through their senses and their intellect and be fully engaged. „

—Jeff Koons