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 sex and desire, race and gender, and celebrity, media, commerce, and fame. A self-proclaimed "idea man," Koons hires artisans and technicians to make the actual works. For him, the hand of the artist is not the important issue: "Art is really just communication of something and the more archetypal it is, the more communicative it is." Focusing on some of the most unexpected objects as models for his work, from balloon animals to advertising to pornography, Koons's works eschew typical standards of "good taste" in art and zero in rather precisely on the vulnerabilities of hierarchies and value systems.

Since his first solo show in 1980, Koons's work has been widely exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions. Koons's exhibition history includes solo shows at the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, the Serpentine Gallery in London, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Château de Versailles in France. Koons's 2014 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art will be the last exhibition staged in the Marcel Breuer building on Mahattan's Upper East Side.