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.
#Pink panther play doh series#
Īnother 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. 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. 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. Koons first exhibited these pieces in the window of the New Museum in New York in 1980. 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. 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. Since 1979 Koons has produced work within series. The Pre-New, The New, and Equilibrium series Starting from 1978 he worked on his Inflatables series, consisting of inflatable flowers and a rabbit of various heights and colors, positioned along with mirrors. Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (1983) by Jeff Koons at Tate Liverpool Early Works and Inflatables īetween 19 Koons produced four separate artworks, which he later referred to as Early Works. Koons used 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". More recently, Koons has downsized staffing and shifted to more automated forms of production and relocated to a much smaller studio space. Until 2019, Koons had a 1,500 m 2 (16,000 sq ft) studio factory near the old Hudson rail yards in Chelsea and employed upwards of 90 to 120 assistants to produce his work. Koons work is produced using a method known as art fabrication. 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. He gained recognition in the 1980s and subsequently set up a factory-like studio in a SoHo loft on the corner of Houston Street and Broadway in New York. 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. After a summer with his parents in Sarasota, Florida, where he briefly worked as a political canvasser, Koons returned to New York and found a new career as a commodities broker, first at Clayton Brokerage Company and then at Smith Barney. In 1980, he became licensed to sell mutual funds and stocks and began working as a Wall Street commodities broker at First Investors Corporation. During this time, he dyed his hair red and often wore a pencil mustache, after Salvador Dalí. Īfter college, Koons moved to New York in 1977 and worked at the membership desk of the Museum of Modern Art while establishing himself as an artist. He lived in Lakeview, and then in the Pilsen neighborhood at Halsted Street and 19th Street.
While a student at the Art Institute, Koons met the artist Ed Paschke, who became a major influence and for whom Koons worked as a studio assistant in the late 1970s. Koons studied painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. As a teenager he revered Salvador Dalí so much that he visited him at the St.
As a child he went door-to-door after school selling gift-wrapping paper and candy to earn pocket money. When he was nine years old, his father would place old master paintings that Koons copied and signed in the window of his shop in an attempt to attract visitors. His father was a furniture dealer and interior decorator. Koons was born in York, Pennsylvania, to Henry and Gloria Koons.