Explore Jeff Koons’s Artwork: 9 Influential Works by Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons is America’s preeminent working artist. Growing up in historic York, Pennsylvania, Jeff took casual painting lessons from a young age, and sold candy and wrapping paper door-to-door. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, before moving to New York City and took a job at the Museum of Modern Art, selling admissions tickets at the membership desk.

By the early 1980s, he was exhibiting “readymades” in earnest—everyday objects in a new context as works of art, as popularized by artists like Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol. Jeff’s first solo gallery show, Equilibrium, opened in 1985. The exhibit centered around a surreal display of pro basketballs, each suspended in water—a breakthrough that garnered press attention and gallery representation. More thematic collections and solo exhibitions followed, and Jeff’s work grew to include a wide array of influences—from kitsch to popular culture. His exhibitions and retrospectives have been displayed at venues including the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Rockefeller Center.

Here are nine of Jeff Koons’s most influential pieces:

1. 1. Inflatable Flower and Bunny (1979). This pivotal, early readymade brought toys and mirrors into Jeff's artistic vocabulary—here, a balloon flower and inflatable rabbit. Cheery and impersonal, these works are reminiscent of Surrealism and Marcel Duchamp while showing the influence of Chicago Pop painter Ed Paschke—an early mentor who encouraged the use of everyday source material. (The bunny reminded Jeff of the Easter decorations in his hometown.) Several motifs, namely the cartoon iconography and the use of reflective surfaces, are still central to his work today.
2. 2. New Hoover Convertible (1980). In one of his earliest shows at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, titled The New, Jeff displayed a series of top-of-the-line vacuum cleaners, arranged in multiple sets. This display of readymade art might have looked simple to create, but achieving the intended effect demanded flawless, high-quality manufactured commercial products—each vacuum cost up to $3,000.
3. 3. Two Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (1985). Pristine basketballs seem to miraculously hover, defying gravity, in the best-known work from Jeff's 1985 Equilibrium series. “I wanted perfect equilibrium, like the embryo in the womb, a state where all pressures are equal,” he says. Jeff wound up consulting with Richard P. Feynman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, to devise a method of filling the balls and tank with correct mixtures of distilled water and highly refined salt, ensuring objects would float on the heavier substance. Temperature fluctuations and visitors’ footsteps blend the water and sodium, causing the balls to sink; the artwork has built into it an inevitable failure, requiring reinstallation every six months. The merger of high concept and extreme technicality set the stage for many of Jeff’s later works.
4. 4. Rabbit (1986). For many people, Jeff is synonymous with a particular image: a gleaming silver, three-foot-tall bunny. This work, Rabbit caused a stir when first shown as part of his Statuary series. The piece became a divisive art-world talking point in 2019, when it sold at the Christie’s art auction for more than $91 million—the highest auction price ever for any work by a living artist. Rabbit exemplifies the artist’s fastidious eye for detail; we see the crimps and dimples of a mylar toy recreated in unforgiving stainless steel, a hyper-realistic replica that tricks the senses. The lack of facial features accentuates its chameleonic charms.
5. 5. Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988). The larger-than-life, gilded-porcelain sculpture of the King of Pop (cradling his pet chimpanzee) was the centerpiece of 1988’s Banality series. The singer, dogged by paparazzi and undergoing frequent surgeries, was at the height of his career when the sculpture was first shown. The sculpture’s pietà composition wasn’t subtle, and Michael Jackson & Bubbles sparked controversy for rendering its subject’s medically lightened skin in alabaster white, along with what were seen as exceedingly feminine facial features. Jeff says the Banality series is “about empowerment” and signaling that all personal histories—even one’s fascination with popular music—are legitimate sources of artistic inspiration. The show elevated Jeff from New York curiosity to global superstar.
6. 6. Bourgeois Bust—Jeff and Ilona (1991). The Made in Heaven series ranks among the strangest, most provocative episodes—not only of Jeff’s career but of art in the twentieth century. The show, which opened in 1991, featured hardcore sexual imagery of the artist and Ilona Staller, a Hungarian-Italian adult film star, displayed in various mediums. The bust, with its allusions to Antonio Canova and classical Baroque pieces, is among the tamest works from Made in Heaven. Jeff would continue recontextualizing fine art for years to follow, most notably in the Gazing Ball series.
7. 7. Balloon Dog (1994). One of the most iconic works of the modern era, Balloon Dog started as a simple idea: create something that would give adults the wonder and delight of children at a birthday celebration. The execution proved far more complex. In a feat of modern fabrication, Jeff translated this concept into this 11-foot-tall, stainless-steel balloon animal sculpture, whose dimensions precisely replicate the contours of a real-life party trick. There are five unique versions of Balloon Dog in Jeff’s Celebration series, all mirror-polished steel, each with different transparent color coatings: blue, magenta, yellow, orange, and red.
8. 8. Play-Doh (1994–2014). Twenty years from conception to completion, Play-Doh is Jeff's masterful memorial to childhood play and innocent creativity. Comprising 27 individual pieces, it recreates in polychromed aluminum, at a monumental scale, a colorful mound of modeling putty once given to Jeff by his son, Ludwig, as a toddler. Initially, he intended to render Play-Doh in polyethylene but couldn’t achieve his desired level of detail. Instead, to capture all the dry cracks and matte textures, each colored section was customized using lost-wax and sand casting, then spray-painted to match the Hasbro color palette of 1994, the year the project began. Play-Doh represents an inflection point of Jeff’s preoccupation with super-realistic, large-scale sculpture.
9. 9. Ballerinas (2010–2014). As a part of his Antiquity series, Jeff combined the influences of ancient art and contemporary work in various ways—for instance, superimposing the Superman logo over classic Greek sculpture. In Ballerinas, Jeff created two mirror-polished ballerinas in the size of classic Greek sculptures.

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