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Jeff Koons — news, coverage & facts — IJR

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'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. 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.

Luxury and Degradation series and Kiepenkerl

First shown in Koons's 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 trader was replaced by Jeff Koons in 1987 for the decennial Skulptur Projekte exhibition. 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." Following this, he stated: "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 part of the collection at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art at Tjuvholmen in Oslo. His work Christ and the Lamb (1988) was described by art historian Gauvin Alexander Bailey 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, all of his new objects were made in an edition of three. This allowed for simultaneous, identical shows at galleries in New York, Cologne, and Chicago. Koons devised the Art Magazine Ads series at this time (1988–1989). Placed in Artforum, Art in America, Flash Art, and ARTnews, 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".

Celebration series

Koons's Celebration series, consisting of a series of large-scale sculptures and paintings of balloon dogs, Valentine hearts, diamonds, and Easter eggs, was conceived in 1994. Each of the 20 different sculptures in the series comes in five differently colored "unique versions", including the cracked Egg (Blue) which 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, and are made of stainless steel, measuring seven feet wide.

Created in an edition of five versions, his later work Tulips (1995–2004) consists of a bouquet of multicolor balloon flowers that are more than 2 m (6.6 ft) tall and 5 m (16 ft) across. Koons started 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's 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. 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 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 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.

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

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 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).

Other projects

In 1999, Koons commissioned a song about himself on Momus's 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 2019, Koons unveiled 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.

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.

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.

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 2005, Koons and fashion designer Stella McCartney recreated his signature Rabbit sculpture as a platinum necklace pendant for her eponymous brand. A 2006 Stella McCartney collection featured prints of Koons's "Lips", "Stream", and "Pink Bow" paintings. Both in 2020 and 2005, Koons worked with Stella McCartney on graphic T-shirts.

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.

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'.

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.

Exhibitions

Since a 1980 window installation at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, Koons's work has been widely exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions. In 1986, he appeared in a group show with Peter Halley, Ashley Bickerton, Ross Minoru Lang and Meyer Vaisman at Sonnabend Gallery in New York. In 1997, the parisian Galerie Jerome de Noirmont organized his first solo show in Europe. His Made in Heaven series was first shown at the Venice Biennale in 1990.

As a young artist, Koons was included in many exhibitions curated by Richard Milazzo including The New Capital at White Columns in 1984, Paravision at Postmasters Gallery in 1985, Cult and Decorum at Tibor De Nagy Gallery in 1986, Time After Time at Diane Brown Gallery in 1986, Spiritual America at CEPA in 1986, and Art at the End of the Social at The Rooseum, Malmö, Sweden in 1988. These exhibitions would be alongside other notable artists such as Ross Bleckner, Joel Otterson, and Kevin Larmon.

His museum solo shows include the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (1988), Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (1993), Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin (2000), Kunsthaus Bregenz (2001), the Museo archeologico nazionale di Napoli (2003), and a retrospective survey at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo (2004), which traveled to the Helsinki City Art Museum (2005). In 2008, the Celebration series was shown at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, and on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Considered as his first retrospective in France, the 2008 exhibition of 17 Koons sculptures at the Château de Versailles also marked the first ambitious display of a contemporary American artist organized by the château. 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. It was also criticized that ninety percent of the US$2.8 million in financing for the exhibition came from private patrons, mainly François Pinault.

The May 31 – September 21, 2008, Koons retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, which was widely publicized in the press, broke the museum's attendance record with 86,584 visitors. The exhibition included numerous works from the MCA collection, along with recent paintings and sculptures by the artist. The retrospective exhibition reflects the MCA's commitment to Koons's work as it presented the artist's first American survey in 1988. For the final exhibition in its Marcel Breuer building, the Whitney Museum is planning to present a Koons retrospective in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

In July 2009, Koons had his first major solo show in London, at the Serpentine Gallery. Entitled Jeff Koons: Popeye Series, the exhibit included cast aluminum models of children's pool toys and "dense, realist paintings of Popeye holding his can of spinach or smoking his pipe, a red lobster looming over his head".

In May 2012, Koons had his first major solo show in Switzerland, at the Beyeler Museum in Basel, entitled Jeff Koons. Shown are works from three series: The New,Banality and Celebration as well as the flowered sculpture Split-Rocker.

Also in 2012, Jeff Koons. The Painter at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt focussed primarily on the artist's development as a painter, while in the show Jeff Koons. The Sculptor at the Liebieghaus in Frankfurt, the sculptures by Jeff Koons entered enter into dialogues with the historical building and a sculpture collection spanning five millennia. Together, both shows form the largest showing of Koons's work to date.

The artist enjoyed a 2014 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Scott Indrisek, writing for ARTINFO.com, described it as "brash, fairly entertaining, and as digestible as a pack of M&Ms".

In 2019 an exhibition called Jeff Koons at the Ashmolean was held at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, United Kingdom.

Art market

Koons is widely collected in America and Europe, where some collectors acquire his work in depth. Eli Broad had 24 pieces, and Dakis Joannou owns some 38 works from all stages of the artist's career.

Koons has been represented by dealers such as Mary Boone (1979–1980), Sonnabend Gallery (1986–2021), Galerie Max Hetzler, Jérôme de Noirmont and Gagosian Gallery. The exclusive right to the primary sale of the "Celebration" series was long held by Gagosian Gallery, his dominant dealer for many years. Since 2021, Pace Gallery has been representing Koons exclusively worldwide.

Many of Koons's works have been sold privately at auctions. His auction records have primarily been achieved from his sculptures (especially those from his Celebration series), whereas his paintings are less popular. In 2001, one of his three Michael Jackson and Bubbles porcelain sculptures sold for US$5.6 million. 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. It was bought by the Gagosian Gallery in New York, which the previous day had purchased another Koons sculpture, Diamond (Blue), for US$11.8 million from Christie's London. Gagosian appears to have bought both Celebration series works on behalf of Ukrainian steel oligarch Victor Pinchuk. In July 2008, his 11-foot (3.3 meter) Balloon Flower (Magenta) (1995–2000) from the collection of Howard and Cindy Rachofsky also sold at Christie's London for an auction record of US$25.7 million. In total, Koons was the top-selling artist at auction with €81.3 million of sales in the year to June 2008.

During the late 2000s recession, however, art prices plummeted and auction sales of high-value works by Koons dropped 50 percent in 2009. A violet Hanging Heart sold for US$11 million in a private sale. However prices for the artist's earlier Luxury and Degradation series appear to be holding up. 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. In 2012, Tulips (1995–2004) brought a record auction price for Koons at Christie's, selling to a telephone bidder for US$33.6 million, well above its high US$25 million estimate. At Christie's in 2015, the oil on canvas Triple Elvis (2009) set a world auction record for a painting by the artist, selling for $8,565,000, over $5 million more than the previous high. Koons's stainless steel Rabbit (1986) sold for $91.1 million at auction in 2019, making it the most expensive work sold by a living artist at auction.

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. Soon after, Hollywood producer Joel Silver filed a similar lawsuit against Gagosion and Koons for failure to deliver an $8 million sculpture in 2014. Both lawsuits were settled in 2019 and 2020.

Evaluation and influence

Koons has received polarized reactions to his work. Critic Amy Dempsey described his Balloon Dog as "an awesome presence ... a massive durable monument". Jerry Saltz at artnet.com has commented on being "wowed by the technical virtuosity and eye-popping visual blast" of Koons's art. Koons was among the names in Blake Gopnik's 2011 list "The 10 Most Important Artists of Today", with Gopnik arguing, "Even after 30 years, Koons's mashups of high and low—a dog knotted from balloons, then enlarged into a public monument; a life-size bust of Michael Jackson and his chimp in gold-and-white porcelain—still feel significant."

Mark Stevens of The New Republic dismissed him as a "decadent artist [who] lacks the imaginative will to do more than trivialize and italicize his themes and the tradition in which he works... He is another of those who serve the tacky rich". 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".

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. Koons really does think he's Michelangelo and is not shy to say so. The significant thing is that there are collectors, especially in America, who believe it. He has the slimy assurance, the gross patter about transcendence through art, of a blow-dried Baptist selling swamp acres in Florida. And the result is that you can't imagine America's singularly depraved culture without him.

Hughes placed Koons's work just above that of Seward Johnson and was quoted in a New York Times article as having stated that comparing their careers was "like debating the merits of dog excrement versus cat excrement".

He has influenced younger artists such as Damien Hirst (for example, in Hirst's Hymn, an 18 ft (5.5 m) version of a 14 in (0.36 m) anatomical toy), Jack Daws, Matthieu Laurette and Mona Hatoum. In turn, his extreme enlargement of mundane objects owes a debt to Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Much of his work also was influenced by artists working in Chicago during his study at the Art Institute, including Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke and H. C. Westermann.

In 2005, he was elected as a Fellow to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Copyright infringement litigation

Koons has been sued several times for copyright infringement over his use of pre-existing images, the original works of others, in his work. In Rogers v. Koons, 960 F.2d 301 (2d Cir. 1992), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld a judgment against him for his use of a photograph of puppies as the basis for a sculpture, String of Puppies.

Koons also lost lawsuits in United Features Syndicate, Inc. v. Koons, 817 F. Supp. 370 (S.D.N.Y. 1993), and Campbell v. Koons, No. 91 Civ. 6055, 1993 WL 97381 (S.D.N.Y. April 1, 1993).

He won one lawsuit, Blanch v. Koons, No. 03 Civ. 8026 (LLS), S.D.N.Y., November 1, 2005 (slip op.), affirmed by the Second Circuit in October 2006, brought over his use of a photographic advertisement as source material for legs and feet in a painting, Niagara (2000). The court ruled that Koons had sufficiently transformed the original advertisement so as to qualify as a fair use of the original image.

In 2015, Koons faced allegations he used photographer Mitchel Gray's 1986 photo for Gordon's Gin in one of his Luxury and Degradation paintings without permission or compensation.

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. This decision was upheld in 2021 on appeal. The result is that the work, owned by Foundazione Prada, cannot be displayed in France and the museum and artist cannot display photographic reproductions online (without a penalty of €600 per day). In addition, the museum and artist were ordered to jointly pay €190,000 and the book company €14,000.

In 2019, a French court ruled that his work 1988 Naked, which depicts a little boy offering flowers to a little girl, both of whom are naked, had infringed on the copyright of a 1975 postcard photograph by French artist Jean-Francois Bauret.

Koons has also accused others of copyright infringement, claiming that a bookstore in San Francisco infringed his copyright in Balloon Dogs by selling bookends in the shape of balloon dogs. Koons dropped the lawsuit after the bookstore's lawyer filed a motion for declaratory relief stating, "As virtually any clown can attest, no one owns the idea of making a balloon dog, and the shape created by twisting a balloon into a dog-like form is part of the public domain".

A Koons sculpture of a ballerina resembles the piece Ballerina Lenochka created by the Ukrainian artist Oksana Zhnykrup in 1974.

In a 2021 complaint filed at the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, artist Michael Hayden who made a sculpture in 1988 of a serpent wrapped around a rock for Ilona Staller claimed that Koons unlawfully used the sculpture in his works. In February 2025, U.S. District Judge Timothy Reif dismissed the lawsuit as time-barred, finding that Hayden should have discovered the alleged infringement earlier. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal in July 2026.

Jeff Koons

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Jeff Koons

🎬 Filmography

Comments

Jeff Koons across IJR

Article

Notable quotes

Notable quotes

Article

Early life

Work

Early Works and Inflatables

The Pre-New, The New, and Equilibrium series

Statuary series

Luxury and Degradation series and Kiepenkerl

Banality series

Made in Heaven series

Puppy

Celebration series

Easyfun and Easyfun-Ethereal

Split-Rocker

Popeye and Hulk Elvis series

Antiquity series

Gazing Ball series

Apollo series

Recent work

Other projects

Exhibitions

Recognition

Art market

Classification

Evaluation and influence

Copyright infringement litigation

ICMEC's Koons Family Institute on International Law and Policy

Personal life

Film and video

🎬 Filmography

Jeff Koons across IJR