ARTIST RESPONSE:
JEFF KOONS
Jeff (Jerffery) Koons is an American artist that was born in York, Pennsylvania on January 21, 1955. He attended the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, and earned his M.F.A. there. His consists of using everyday objects to transform the space into his own "Artpop". His installations are base on consumerism and the human experience. A major influence in his life and work is Ed Paschke, an artist whom he met while visiting the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Artist Response – Jeff Koons
Jeff (Jeffrey) Koons is an American artist that was born in York, Pennsylvania on January 21,
1955. When he was young, he used to help out at his father’s interior design business. Working with his
father gave him an appreciation for art . He studied art at Maryland School of Art in Baltimore where he
earned his MFA. Koons idolised the Pop artist Ed Paschke, whom he met while visiting the school of the
art institute of Chicago. Koons then became his studio assistant. He later moved to New York where he
worked on the membership desk of the Museum of Modern Art.
Koons gained recognition in the 1980s. He worked in a factory-like studio in a SoHo loft on the
corner of Houston Street and Broadway in New York with a staff of over 30 assistants, each of them
assigned to a different aspect of producing his work. Today, he has a 16,000 square foot factory working
with about 90 to 120 assistants. He developed 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".
Koons describes his process of making art by “it taking you outside yourself and past yourself”,
saying that when he was young, it gave him a sense of being.
His work consists of using everyday objects to transform the space into his own "Artpop". His
installations are based on consumerism and the human experience. The idea of taking something
ordinary and making it into an admirable larger-than-life work of art. One of his most famous series,
Celebration, included transforming the idea of balloon animals into massive steel sculptures.
