Jeff Koons began his series titled The New, which consisted of household appliances taken from their everyday context and placing them inside Plexiglas display cases, in 1980. By "re-framing" the objects as sculptural rather than functional, Koons forces the viewer to consider the vacuum cleaner on a formal level as a minimal and conceptual construction. Not unlike Andy Warhol’s re-appropriation of popular commercial items such as soup cans and Brillo-pads, Koons’s pointed disruption of the familiar aims brings new meaning to the commonplace items that populate our lives. The artist has commented: “I chose the vacuum cleaner because of its anthropomorphic qualities. It is a breathing machine. It also displays both male and female sexuality. It has orifices and phallic attachments. I have always tried to create work which does not alienate any part of my audience.” Koons attaches a profusion of meaning to the things he sees and therefore to the objects he presents as art. 

Since his emergence in the 1980s Jeff Koons has blended the concerns and methods of Pop, Conceptual, and appropriation art with craft-making and popular culture to create his own unique iconography, often controversial and always engaging. His work explores contemporary obsessions with race and gender, celebrity, media, commerce, and fame.  Focusing on some of the most unexpected objects as models for his work, from vacuum cleaners and inflatable flowers to novelty drink caddies, Koons eschewed typical standards of "good taste" in art, instead embracing conventional, distinctly American, middle-class values to expose the vulnerabilities of hierarchies and value systems. 

Koons was born in 1955 in York, Pennsylvania and currently lives and works in New York.

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