American artist born in York, Pennsylvania. Studied at Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, School of Art, Baltimore, School of Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois. 1980 First one-person exhibition, a window installation, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. Emergent in the eighties, he was an artist to whom mass-market consumerism in itself offered imaginative possibilities. Found a genuine aesthetic pleasure in contemporary consumer culture. In the early eighties he showed the series The New, where he explored the reaction that accompanies the acquisition of consumer goods and provokes such a “strange excitement in people” as he said in a interview.” Taking an utilitalirian object like a vacuum cleaner out of its functional context, Koons gives it a different status by enclosing it in an elegant plexiglas vitrine with fluorescent showcase lighting. For Koons it is both an aesthetic object (unlike the ready mades of Duchamp) and a social icon. Koons then deliberately moved into kitsch and consumer icons for the rich. Selected exhibitions: 1985 Objects in Collision, The Kitchen, New York, Recent Sculpture and its Antecedents, Whitney Museum of American Art, Stamford, Connecticut, 1987 Avant-Garde in the Eighties, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 1990 Venice Biennale, High and Low, Modern Art and Popular Culture, MoMA, travelled to Chicago, Los Angeles). 1993 American Art in the 20th Century, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1996 Guggenheim Museum, New York. Lives in New York.
