Jeff Koons: A Retrospective

Koons moved to New York in 1977 after completing his studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. While there he had been making paintings inspired by his dreams and the work of his hero Salvador Dalí. In New York, he took a job selling memberships at the Museum of Modern Art, where he encountered recent Conceptual Art and the readymades of Marcel Duchamp. For Koons, these unaltered industrial products—a urinal or shovel—engaged the everyday world more directly than the images he had painted from his fantasies. His first experiments with the readymade involved the cheap inflatables he found scouring novelty shops in downtown Manhattan. He used these toys to turn his East Village apartment into a riotous installation and to make sculptures that explore the fetishes and other irrational forces driving consumer culture.