Jeffrey Lynn Koons (/kuːnz/; born January 21, 1955)[1] is an American artist recognized for his work dealing with popular culture and his sculptures depicting everyday objects, including balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror-finish surfaces.

After a summer with his parents in Sarasota, Florida, where he briefly worked as a political canvasser, Koons returned to New York and found a new career as a commodities broker, first at Clayton Brokerage Company and then at Smith Barney.

[29] Another example for Koons's early work is The Equilibrium Series (1983), consisting of one to three basketballs floating in distilled water, a project the artist had researched with the help of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman.

[7] The Total Equilibrium Tanks are completely filled with distilled water and a small amount of ordinary salt, to assist the hollow balls in remaining suspended in the centre of the liquid.

On October 15, 2009, the giant metallic monochrome color rabbit used during the 2007 Macy's Thanksgiving day parade[34] was put on display for Nuit Blanche in the Eaton Centre in Toronto.

[37] This group included a stainless steel travel cocktail cabinet, a Baccarat crystal decanter and other hand-made renderings of alcohol-related paraphernalia, as well as reprinted and framed ads for drinks such as Gordon's Gin ("I Could Go for Something Gordon's"), Hennessy ("Hennessy, The Civilized Way to Lay Down the Law"), Bacardi ("Aquí... el gran sabor del ron Bacardi"), Dewars ("The Empire State of Scotch"), Martell ("I Assume You Drink Martell") and Frangelico ("Stay in Tonight" and "Find a Quiet Table")[38] in seductively intensified colors on canvas[8] Koons appropriated these advertisements and revalued them by recontextualizing them into artworks.

[52] Arts journalist Arifa Akbar reported for The Independent that in "an era when artists were not regarded as 'stars', Koons went to great lengths to cultivate his public persona by employing an image consultant".

Featuring photographs by Matt Chedgey, Koons placed "advertisements in international art magazines of himself surrounded by the trappings of success" and gave interviews "referring to himself in the third person".

[54] Including works with such titles as Dirty Ejaculation and Ilonaʼs Asshole, the series of enormous grainy[55] photographs printed on canvas, glassworks, and sculptures portrayed Koons and Staller in highly explicit sexual positions and created considerable controversy.

The paintings of the series reference art from the Baroque and Rococo periods—among others, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Jean-Honoré Fragonard and François Boucher—and also draw upon the breakthroughs of early modern painters as Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet.

[78] Koons was pushing to finish the series in time for a 1996 exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, but the show was ultimately canceled because of production delays and cost overruns.

[79] When "Celebration" funding ran out, the staff was laid off, a crew of two: Gary McCraw, Koons's studio manager, who had been with him since 1990, and Justine Wheeler, an artist from South Africa, who had arrived in 1995 and eventually took charge of the sculpture operation.

[87] In 2000, Koons designed Split-Rocker, his second floral sculpture made of stainless steel, soil, geotextile fabric, and an internal irrigation system, which was first shown at the Palais des Papes in Avignon, France.

[91] In summer 2014 Split-Rocker was installed at Rockefeller Plaza in New York City for several months in coincidence with the opening of Koons's retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

[102] The sculpture Hulk (Organ) (2004–2014) includes a fully functional musical instrument whose potential deep sounds match the figure's powerful and masculine appearance.

The images range from abstract landscapes to elements of American iconography (trains, horses, carriages) and comprise characters such as the Hulk or an inflatable plastic monkey.

[102] In Ballerinas (2010–2014), Koons depicts figurines of dancers, derived from decorative porcelain works designed by Ukrainian artist Oksana Zhnikrup, at the imposing scale of classical sculpture.

[109][110][111][112] In this series presented at Gagosian Gallery in 2015, Koons has taken 35 masterpieces, including Manet's Déjeuner sur l'Herbe, Géricault's Raft of the Medusa and Rembrandt's Self-Portrait Wearing a Hat, had them repainted in oil on canvas, and added a little shelf, painted as if it had sprouted directly from the image.

[115] After creating Gazing Ball paintings, Koons also made several white sculptures from the Greco-Roman era along with everyday utilitarian objects encountered in today's suburban and rural landscape, such as mailboxes and a birdbath.

[116] For the 2007–2008 season in the Vienna State Opera, Koons designed the large-scale picture (176 sqm) Geisha as part of the exhibition series "Safety Curtain", conceived by museum in progress.

The sculptures, named after historical figures such as Leonardo da Vinci and Billie Holiday, were part of a larger project involving a lunar lander designed by Intuitive Machines.

Later that year he presented another handful of bags and accessories featuring the reproductions of works by Claude Monet, J. M. W. Turner, Édouard Manet, Paul Gauguin and François Boucher.

[citation needed] From his limited-edition 2010 Tulip designs for Kiehl's Crème de Corps, a portion of the proceeds went to the Koons Family Institute, an initiative of the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children.

The New York Times reported that "several dozen people demonstrated outside the palace gates" in a protest arranged by a little-known, right-wing group dedicated to French artistic purity.

On November 14, 2007, Hanging Heart (Magenta/Gold) from the collection of Adam Lindemann, one of five in different colors, sold at Sotheby's New York for US$23.6 million becoming, at the time, the most expensive piece by a living artist ever auctioned.

The Economist reported that Thomas H. Lee, a private-equity investor, sold Jim Beam J.B. Turner Train (1986) in a package deal brokered by Giraud Pissarro Segalot for more than US$15 million.

[169] In 2018, billionaire art collector Steven Tananbaum brought a lawsuit against Koons and Gagosian Gallery for failing to deliver three sculptures, Balloon Venus, Eros and Diana, for which he paid $13 million.

[186] Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times saw "one last, pathetic gasp of the sort of self-promoting hype and sensationalism that characterized the worst of the 1980s" and called Koons's work "artificial", "cheap", and "unabashedly cynical".

[187] In an article comparing the contemporary art scene with show business, critic Robert Hughes wrote that Koons is an extreme and self-satisfied manifestation of the sanctimony that attaches to big bucks.

[197] In 2018, a French court ruled that his 1988 work Fait d'Hiver, which depicts a pig standing over a woman who is lying on her back, had copied an advertisement for a clothing chain and found Koons and the Centre Pompidou guilty of infringing photographer Franck Davidovici's copyright.