Jeff Koons rose to prominence in the mid-1980s as part of a generation of artists who explored the meaning of art in a media-saturated era and the attendant crisis of representation. With his stated artistic intention to "communicate with the masses," Koons draws from the visual language of advertising, marketing, and the entertainment industry. Testing the limits between popular and elite culture, his sculptural menagerie includes Plexiglas-encased Hoover vacuum cleaners, basketballs suspended in glass aquariums, photographs of himself coupled with his then-wife Ilona Staller A.K.A. La Cicciolina (former adult-film star and Italian member of parliament) and porcelain homages to Michael Jackson and the Pink Panther. In extending the lineage of Dada [more] and Marcel Duchamp, and integrating references to Minimalism [more] and Pop, Koons stages art as a commodity that cannot be placed within the hierarchy of conventional aesthetics.
Koons�s series Easyfun-Ethereal foregrounds happy-face deli sandwiches, spiraling roller-coaster rides, and wind-swept hair all set against sublime landscapes. The artist combines familiar yet unrelated images to create collage-like paintings rendered with photorealist perfection. These works recall the advertising iconography and billboard-style painting technique present in James Rosenquist�s canvases. Koons�s new brand of Pop painting cleverly engages other art-historical references�in particular Surrealism [more] and Abstract Expressionism�to depict gravity-defying forms of dreamlike pleasure.
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