Jeff Koons

Jeffrey Lynn Koons 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. He lives and works in both New York City and his hometown of York, Pennsylvania. His works have sold for substantial sums, including at least two record auction prices for a work by a living artist: US$58.4 million for Balloon Dog (Orange) in 2013 and US$91.1 million for Rabbit in 2019.

Critics come sharply divided in their views of Koons. Some view his work as pioneering and of major art-historical importance. Others dismiss his work as kitsch, crass, and based on cynical self-merchandising. Koons has stated that there are no hidden meanings or critiques in his works.

Work
Following his graduation from the Art Institute in Chicago in 1976, Koons made his way to New York City. There, he moved away from creating representations of his personal fantasies and began to explore objective art, commerce, and politics.

He rose to prominence in the mid-1980s as part of a generation of artists who explored the meaning of art in a newly media-saturated era with his Pre-new The New series. With recognition came the establishment of a factory-like studio located in a loft at the corner of Houston Street and Broadway in New York in SoHo. It was staffed with over 30 assistants, each assigned to a different aspect of producing his work-in a similar mode as Andy Warhol's Factory. Koons's work is produced using a method known as art fabrication. Until 2019, Koons had a 1,500 m2 (16,000 sq ft) studio factory near the old Hudson rail yards in Chelsea employing 90 to 120 assistants to produce his work. More recently, Koons has downsized staffing and shifted to more automated forms of production and relocated to a much smaller studio space. He now uses technology to create his artistic references on computers and color-corrects them until he is satisfied with the results. To ensure consistency, Koons implemented a color-by-numbers system, so that each of his assistants could execute his canvases and sculptures as if they had been done "by a single hand". Throughout his career, he has consistently explored themes such as consumerist behavior, seduction, banality, and childhood, among others.

Early Works and Inflatables
Jeff Koons first began experimenting with the use of ready-made objects and modes of display in his apartment in 1976. His fascination with the extravagant world of luxurious goods and their more affordable counterparts led him to collect items like toys, metallic finishes, leopard skin, and porcelain. Between 1977 and 1979 Koons produced four separate artworks, which he later referred to as Early Works. In 1978 he began working on his Inflatables series, consisting of inflatable flowers and a rabbit of various heights and colors, positioned along with mirrors. Koons drew inspiration from Robert Smithson's emphasis on display and connected his work to his father's furniture store displays. He documented his work through photography, using it as a means of exploring different installation techniques.

The Pre-New, The New, and Equilibrium series
Since 1979 Koons has produced work within series. His early work was in the form of conceptual sculpture, an example of which is The Pre-New, a series of domestic objects attached to light fixtures, resulting in strange new configurations. Another example is The New, a series of vacuum-cleaners, often selected for brand names that appealed to the artist like the iconic Hoover, which he had mounted in illuminated Perspex boxes. Koons first exhibited these pieces in the window of the New Museum in New York in 1980. He chose a limited combination of vacuum cleaners and arranged them in cabinets accordingly, juxtaposing the verticality of the upright cleaners with the squat cylinders of the "Shelton Wet/Dry drum" cleaners. At the museum, the machines were displayed as if in a showroom, and oriented around a central red fluorescent lightbox with just the words "The New" written on it as if it were announcing some new concept or marketing brand. They were shown again in a major solo show at Jeff Koons: The New Encased Works at Daniel Weinberg Gallery in 1987.

Another example for Koons' 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. 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. In a second version, the 50/50 Tanks, only half the tank is filled with distilled water, with the result that the balls float half in and half out of the water. In addition, Koons conceived and fabricated five unique works for the Encased series (1983-1993/98), sculptures consisting of stacked sporting balls (four rows of six basketballs each, and one row of six soccer balls) with their original cardboard packaging in glass display case. Also part of the Equilibrium series are posters featuring basketball stars in Nike advertisements and 10 bronze objects, representing lifesaving gear.

Statuary series
In 1986, Jeff Koons introduced the Statuary series, featuring ten pieces that reimagined his earlier inflatable series from the 1970s. The series aimed to illustrate how art often mirrors self-perception and evolves into decorative expression by presenting a panoramic view of society. The sculptures drew inspiration from historical figures like Louis XIV and Bob Hope, as well as other art historical themes and sources. Through Statuary, Koons redirected his artistic focus toward the concept of artistic taste and the societal role of art. He incorporated some readymade objects, including the inflatable rabbit, and transformed them into highly polished stainless-steel pieces. This led to the creation of one of his most iconic works, Rabbit (1986).

There are three identical versions of Rabbit. One version was previously part of art collector Stephan Edlis's personal collection, but it now resides as a gift at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and another in The Broad Museum in Los Angeles. In May 15, 2019, Jeff Koons set a record for most expensive piece sold by a living artist, for the sale of "Rabbit". The third version of the piece was sold at Christie's Auction House for US$80 million which. After including auctioneer's fees, the final sale price of "Rabbit" was US$91,075,000.

The Rabbit has since returned to its original soft form, and many times larger at more than 50 feet high, taken to the air. On October 15, 2009, the giant metallic monochrome color rabbit used during the 2007 Macy's Thanksgiving day parade was put on display for Nuit Blanche in the Eaton Centre in Toronto. The other objects of the series combine objects Koons found in souvenir shops and baroque imagery, thereby playing with the distinction between low art and high art.

Luxury and Degradation series and Kiepenkerl
First shown in Koons' eponymous exhibitions at the short-lived International With Monument Gallery, New York, and at Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles, in 1986, the Luxury and Degradation series is a group of works thematically centered on alcohol. 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") in seductively intensified colors on canvas Koons appropriated these advertisements and revalued them by recontextualizing them into artworks. They "deliver a critique of traditional advertising that supports Baudrillard's censorious view of the obscene promiscuity of consumer signs". Another work, Jim Beam - J.B. Turner Engine (1986), is based on a commemorative, collectible in bottle in the form of a locomotive that was created by Jim Beam; however, Koons appropriated this model and had it cast in gleaming stainless-steel. The train model cast in steel titled Jim Beam - Baggage Car (1986) even contains Jim Beam bourbon. With the Luxury and Degradation series Koons interfered into the realms of the social. He created an artificial and gleaming surface which represented a proletarian luxury. It was interpreted as seduction by simulation because it was fake luxury. Being the producer of this deception brought him to a kind of leadership, as he commented himself.

The same material of stainless steel was used for the statue of Kiepenkerl. After being rebuilt in the 1950s, the figure of the itinerant trader was replaced by Jeff Koons in 1987 for the decennial Skulptur Projekte exhibition. Standing on a central square in Münster, the statue retained a certain cultural power as a nostalgic symbol of the past. During the production process, the foundry where the piece was being made wanted to knock the ceramic shell off too soon, which resulted in the piece being bent and deformed. Koons decided to bring in a specialist and give the piece "radical plastic surgery." After this experience he felt liberated: "I was now free to work with objects that did not necessarily pre-exist. I could create models."

Banality series
Koons then moved on to the Banality series. For this project he engaged workshops in Germany and Italy that had a long tradition of working in ceramic, porcelain, and wood. The series culminated in 1988 with Michael Jackson and Bubbles, a series of three life-size gold-leaf plated porcelain statues of the sitting singer cuddling Bubbles, his pet chimpanzee. Three years later, one of these sold at Sotheby's New York for US$5.6 million. Two of these sculptures are now at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) in downtown Los Angeles. The statue was included in a 2004 retrospective at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo which traveled a year later to the Helsinki City Art Museum. It also featured in his second retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in 2008. The statue is currently back at the newly opened Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art at Tjuvholmen in Oslo. Recently, his work Christ and the Lamb (1988) has been analyzed as an acknowledgment and critique of the spiritual and meditative power of the Rococo.

Anticipating a less than generous critical response to his 1988 Banality series exhibition, with all of his new objects made in an edition of three, allowing for simultaneous, identical shows at galleries in New York, Cologne, and Chicago, Koons devised the Art Magazine Ads series (1988-1989). Placed in Artforum, Art in America, Flash Art, and Art News, the ads were designed as promotions for his own gallery exhibitions. Koons also issued Signature Plate, an edition for Parkett magazine, with a photographic decal in colors on a porcelain plate with gold-plated rim. 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".

Made in Heaven series
In 1989, the Whitney Museum and its guest curator Marvin Heiferman asked Koons to make an artwork about the media on a billboard for the show "Image World: Art and Media Culture". The billboard was meant as an advertisement for an unmade movie, entitled Made in Heaven. Koons employed his then-wife Ilona Staller ("Cicciolina") as a model in the shoot that formed the basis of the resulting work for the Whitney, Made in Heaven (1990-1991). Including works with such titles as Dirty Ejaculation and Ilonaʼs Asshole, the series of enormous grainy 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.

The series was first shown at the 1990 Venice Biennale. Koons reportedly destroyed much of the work when Staller took their son Ludwig with her to Italy. In celebration of Made in Heaven's 20th anniversary, Luxembourg & Dayan chose to present a redux edition of the series. The Whitney Museum also exhibited several of the photographs on canvas in their 2014 retrospective.

Puppy
Koons was not among the 44 American artists selected to exhibit their work in Documenta 9 in 1992, but was commissioned by three art dealers to create a piece for nearby Arolsen Castle in Bad Arolsen, Germany. The result was Puppy, a 43 ft (13 m) tall topiary sculpture of a West Highland White Terrier puppy, executed in a variety of flowers (including Marigolds, Begonias, Impatiens, Petunias, and Lobelias) on a transparent color-coated chrome stainless steel substructure. The self-cleaning flowers would grow for the specific length of time that the piece was exhibited. The size and location of Puppy -the courtyard of a baroque palace- acknowledged the mass audience. After the outbreak that followed his Made in Heaven series, Koons decided to make "an image that communicated warmth and love to people."

In 1995, in a co-venture between Museum of Contemporary Art, Kaldor Public Art Projects and Sydney Festival, the sculpture was dismantled and re-erected at the Museum of Contemporary Art on Sydney Harbour on a new, more permanent, stainless steel armature with an internal irrigation system. While the Arolsen Puppy had 20,000 plants, the Sydney version held around 60,000.

The piece was purchased in 1997 by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and installed on the terrace outside the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Before the dedication at the museum, an Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) trio disguised as gardeners attempted to plant explosive-filled flowerpots near the sculpture, but was foiled by Basque police officer Jose María Aguirre, who then was shot dead by ETA members. Currently the square in which the statue is placed bears the name of Aguirre. In the summer of 2000, the statue traveled to New York City for a temporary exhibition at Rockefeller Center.

Media mogul Peter Brant and his wife, model Stephanie Seymour, commissioned Koons to create a duplicate of the Bilbao statue Puppy (1993) for their Connecticut estate, the Brant Foundation Art Study Center. In 1998, a miniature version of Puppy was released as a white glazed porcelain vase, in an edition of 3000.

Celebration series
Koons' Celebration was to honor the ardently hoped-for return of Ludwig from Rome. Consisting of a series of large-scale sculptures and paintings of balloon dogs, Valentine hearts, diamonds, and Easter eggs, was conceived in 1994. Some of the pieces are still being fabricated. Each of the 20 different sculptures in the series comes in five differently colored "unique versions", including the artist's cracked Egg (Blue) won the 2008 Charles Wollaston Award for the most distinguished work in the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition. The Diamond pieces were created between 1994 and 2005, made of shiny stainless steel seven-feet wide. Created in an edition of five versions, his later work Tulips (1995-2004) consists of a bouquet of multicolor balloon flowers blown up to gargantuan proportions (more than 2 m (6.6 ft) tall and 5 m (16 ft) across). Koons finally started to work on Balloon Flower in 1995.

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. When "Celebration" funding ran out, the staff was laid off, leaving a skeleton crew of two: Gary McCraw, Koons' 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. The artist convinced his primary collectors Dakis Joannou, Peter Brant, and Eli Broad, along with dealers Jeffrey Deitch, Anthony d'Offay, and Max Hetzler, to invest heavily in the costly fabrication of the Celebration series at Southern California-based Carlson & Company (including his Balloon Dog and Moon series), and later, at Arnold, a Frankfurt-based company. The dealers funded the project in part by selling works to collectors before they were fabricated. In 1999, his 1988 "Pink Panther" sculpture sold at auction for US$1.8 million, and he returned to the Sonnabend gallery. Well aware of Koons' needs and demands, Ileana Sonnabend and Antonio Homem, her gallery director and adopted son, nevertheless welcomed him back; in all likelihood they sensed (correctly, it turned out) that he was poised for a glorious second act-something that only he, among his generation of overpublicized artists, has so far managed to pull off. Koons, however, no longer confines himself to a single gallery. Larry Gagosian, the colossus of New York dealers, agreed to finance the completion of all the unfinished "Celebration" work, in exchange for exclusive rights to sell it.

In 2006, Koons presented Hanging Heart, a 9-foot-tall highly polished, steel heart, one of a series of five differently colored examples, part of his Celebration series. Large sculptures from that series were exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2008. Later additions to the series include Balloon Swan (2004-2011), an 11.5-foot (3.5-meter), stainless-steel bird, Balloon Rabbit (2005-2010), and Balloon Monkey, all for which children's party favors are reconceived as mesmerizing monumental forms.

The series also includes, in addition to sculptures, sixteen oil paintings.

Easyfun and Easyfun-Ethereal
Commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim in 1999, Koons created the first seven paintings of the new series, Easyfun, comprising paintings and wall-mounted sculptures. In 2001, Koons undertook a series of paintings, Easyfun-Ethereal, using a collage approach that combined bikinis, food, and landscapes painted under his supervision by assistants. The series eventually expanded to twenty-four paintings.

Split-Rocker
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. Like Puppy, it is covered with around 27,000 live flowers, including petunias, begonias, impatiens, geraniums and marigolds. Weighing 150 tons and soaring over 37 feet high, Split-Rocker is composed of two halves: one based on a toy pony of one of Koons' sons, the other based on a toy dinosaur. Together, they form the head of a giant child's rocker. Koons produced just two editions of the sculpture. As of 2014, he owns one of them; the other is displayed at Glenstone in Maryland. At Glenstone, Split-Rocker is in bloom from mid-May to mid-October, and requires daily caretaking during that period. In summer 2014 Split-Rocker was installed at Rockefeller Plaza in New York City for several months in coincidence with the opening of Koons' retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Popeye and Hulk Elvis series
Paintings and sculptures from the Popeye series, which Koons began in 2002, feature the cartoon figures of Popeye and Olive Oyl. One such item is a stainless steel reproduction of a mass-market PVC Popeye figurine. The artist will also make use of inflatable animals again, this time in combination with ladders, trashcans and fences. To create these sculptures, the toys get a layer of coating after finding the right shape. Then a hard copy is made and sent to the foundry to be cast in aluminium. Back in the studio the sculptures are painted in order to achieve the shiny look of the original inflatables. For these surrealist installations, Acrobat in particular, Koons got inspiration from the Chicago Imagist H.C. Westermann. The Popeye sculpture was purchased by billionaire Steve Wynn for $28 million and it is displayed outside the casino entrance at Wynn's Encore Boston Harbor hotel and casino property.

Hulk Elvis is a work series by Koons created between 2004 and 2014. The works range from precision-machined bronze sculptures-inspired by an inflatable of the popular comic book hero and extruded in three dimensions-to large-scale oil paintings. The work series' title combines the popular comic book hero Hulk with the pop icon Elvis. The triple image of the Hulk figure recalls Andy Warhol's silk-screen printing Triple Elvis (1963), regarding both the multiplication and the posture of the Hulk figure.

According to the artist, the Hulk Elvis series with its strong, heroic image of the Hulk represents "a very high-testosterone body of work". Koons also perceives the series as "a bridge between East and West", since a parallel might be drawn between the comic book hero Hulk and Asian guardian Gods.

The three-dimensional works Hulk (Friends) and Hulks (Bell) (both 2004-2012) feature apparently inflatable Incredible Hulks that actually weigh almost a ton each and are made of bronze and wood. 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 series' paintings are collages made of several photoshop layers. 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. The landscape paintings often have explicit or implicit sexual content. For example, a recurrent crude line drawing of a vulva refers to Courbet's L'Origine du monde (1866).

The Hulk Elvis series has been exhibited at a number of international art venues such as the Gagosian Gallery in London (2007), the Gagosian Gallery in Hong Kong, China (2014) and the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna, Austria (2015).

Antiquity series
In 2008, Jeff Koons started working on his Antiquity series, delving into themes of the portrayal of eros, fertility, and feminine beauty across the history of art. At the center of each scene in the Antiquity paintings (2009-2013) is a famous ancient or classical sculpture, meticulously rendered in oil paint and scaled to the same size as the sculptures. The equally detailed backdrops include an Arcadian vision. Koons makes use of contemporary technology, including CT scans and digital imaging, to produce the metal sculptures. He reinterprets historical figures through the creation of balloon-like sculptures, such as the Metallic Venus, and by integrating representative figures and characters from comic books.

Referring to the ancient Roman marble statue Callipygian Venus, Metallic Venus (2010-2012) was made of high chromium stainless steel with transparent color coating and live flowering plants.

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.

Gazing Ball series
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. Each work includes a blue glass gazing ball that sits on a painted aluminum shelf attached to the front of the painting. Both viewer and painting are reflected in the gazing ball.

Gazing Ball takes its name from the mirrored spherical ornaments frequently found on lawns, gardens, and patios around Koons's childhood home in Pennsylvania. 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.

Apollo series
In June 2022, Dakis Jouannou commissioned Koons to create an artwork for his space at DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, on the Greek island of Hydra. Koons created the series Apollo, including a sculpture titled Apollo Wind Spinner (2020-2022), a 9.1 meter (30-foot) wide reflective wind spinner above the Slaughterhouse art space. The walls within the Slaughterhouse have been transformed by using as the base the ancient frescoes from Boscoreale, near Pompeii. The exhibition includes several other new works including a pair of bronze Nike sneakers, Gazing Ball Tripod (2020-2022), and Plato's Solid Forms Wind Spinners (2020-2022).

Recent work
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. Koons worked with American pop performer Lady Gaga on her 2013 studio album Artpop, including the creation of its cover artwork featuring a sculpture he made of Lady Gaga.

In September 2014, the bi-annual arts and culture publication GARAGE Magazine published Koons' first ever digital artwork for the front of its print edition. The piece, titled Lady Bug, is an augmented reality sculpture that can only be viewed on mobile devices through a GARAGE Magazine app, which allows viewers to explore the piece from a variety of angles as if standing on top of it.

In 2012, Koons bought Advanced Stone Technologies, an offshoot of the non-profit Johnson Atelier Technical Institute of Sculpture's stone division. He moved the high-tech stone workshop from New Jersey to a larger, 60,000 sq ft (5,600 m2) space in Morrisville, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. The facility exists solely to fabricate Koons' works made of stone.

In 2013 Koons created the sculpture Gazing Ball (Farnese Hercules), which was inspired by the Farnese Hercules. The sculpture is made from white plaster and can be interpreted as perpetuating colorism in how we view the ancient world.

In july 2024 Koons announced designing his masterpiece new artwork in collaboration with Daryush Shokof regarding the sculptures for this extraordinary artwork titled ART4+ that is a conceptual artwork created by Daryush Shokof. This immaculate artwork starts auction at 11 Billion USD under the supervision of Larry Gagosian on September 9, 2024.[],[][], []

Other projects
In 1999, Koons commissioned a song about himself on Momus' album Stars Forever.

A drawing similar to his Tulip Balloons was placed on the front page of the Internet search engine Google. The drawing greeted all who visited Google's main page on April 30, 2008, and May 1, 2008.

In 2006 Koons appeared on Artstar, an unscripted television series set in the New York art world. He had a minor role in the 2008 film Milk playing state assemblyman Art Agnos.

In September 2012, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo gave Koons the task of helping to review the designs for a new Tappan Zee Bridge.

In late 2016, Koons unveiled plans for Bouquet of Tulips, an 11-meter high commemorative sculpture in Paris modelled on the Statue of Liberty, honoring the victims of the November 2015 attacks.

In February 2024, a SpaceX rocket carrying 125 of Koon's stainless steel miniature moon sculptures departed from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. 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. The lander, which also carried NASA equipment, reached the Moon on February 22. Koons, inspired by President Kennedy's vision of space exploration, saw this project as a way to inspire society. This endeavor, which included plans for larger sculptures on Earth and corresponding NFTs, aimed to be the first authorized artwork on the moon, protected under the Artemis Accords.

Curating
Koons acted as curator of an Ed Paschke exhibition at Gagosian Gallery, New York, in 2009. He also curated an exhibition in 2010 of works from the private collection of Greek billionaire Dakis Joannou at the New Museum in New York City. The exhibition, Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection, generated debate concerning cronyism within the art world as Koons is heavily collected by Joannou and had previously designed the exterior of Joannou's yacht Guilty.

BMW Art Car
Koons was the artist named to design the seventeenth in the series of BMW "Art Cars". His artwork was applied to a race-spec E92 BMW M3, and revealed to the public at The Pompidou Centre in Paris on June 2, 2010. Backed by BMW Motorsport, the car then competed at the 2010 24 Hours of Le Mans in France.

Collaborations
In 1989, Koons and fellow artist Martin Kippenberger worked together on an issue of the art journal Parkett; the following year, Koons designed an exhibition poster for Kippenberger.

In 2013, Koons collaborated with American singer-songwriter and performance artist Lady Gaga for her third studio album, ARTPOP. The album cover depicts a nude sculpture of Gaga made by Koons behind a blue ball sculpture, and pieces of other art works in the background such as Birth of Venus painted by Sandro Botticelli, which inspired Gaga's image through the new era, including in her music video for "Applause" and the performance of the song at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards. The image of the cover was revealed piece-by-piece in a social marketing campaign where her fans had to tweet the Twitter hashtag "#iHeartARTPOP" to unlock it. The song "Applause" itself includes the lyrics "One second I'm a Koons, then suddenly the Koons is me."

In April 2017, Koons collaborated with the French luxury fashion house Louis Vuitton for the "Masters Collection" and designed a series of handbags and backpacks featuring the reproductions of his favorite masterpieces by the Old Masters, such as Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, Vincent van Gogh, Peter Paul Rubens and Jean-Honoré Fragonard. 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. The prices range from $585 for a key chain to $4,000 for the large carryall. he also collaborated with singer Cupcakke multiple times in 2019.

Wine
Koons has also produced some fine wine-related commissions. In December 2012, Chateau Mouton Rothschild announced that Koons was the artist for their 2010 vintage label - a tradition that was started in 1946. Other artists to design labels include Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon, Salvador Dalí and Joan Miró, amongst others. In August 2013, Dom Pérignon released their 2004 vintage, with a special edition done by Koons, as well as a made-to-order case called the 'Balloon Venus'. This has a recommended retail price of €15,000.

Charity
From February 15 to March 6, 2008, Koons donated a private tour of his studio to the Hereditary Disease Foundation for auction on Charitybuzz. 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. Since his relationship with the International Centre began, Koons has given over US$4.3 million to the Institute that bears his family's name.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2024