Jeff Koons (b. 1955) is one of the most influential and controversial artists of the contemporary era, whose meticulously produced sculptures of everyday and popular objects have made him a defining figure of postmodern American art. Working with seductive commercial materials such as the high-chromium stainless steel of his unique large-scale Balloon Dogs or his vinyl inflatables, Koons turns banal objects into icons of high art. Famous for creating large Balloon Dogs in Blue, Magenta, Red, Orange, and Yellow, he produces sculpture that seems to defy gravity and appear weightless. His Orange Balloon Dog sold at Christie's in November 2013 for a record price of 58.4 million dollars, becoming at the time the most expensive work of art by a living artist ever sold at auction.

Born in York, Pennsylvania, in 1955, Koons studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art and briefly at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Before achieving major artistic recognition, he worked at the membership desk of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and later as a commodities broker on Wall Street, experiences that gave him a direct understanding of the mechanics of contemporary consumer culture and financial capital that would come to inform his art. He emerged as a major artistic voice in the 1980s with his celebrated series The New, in which he encased pristine vacuum cleaners in illuminated Plexiglas vitrines, and Equilibrium, which featured basketballs suspended in perfectly balanced tanks of water.

Koons's subsequent bodies of work have included Banality, Made in Heaven, Celebration (which contains the Balloon Dogs, Balloon Flowers, and other monumental confections), Popeye, Antiquity, and Gazing Ball. His stainless steel Puppy, installed outside the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, has become one of the most beloved public sculptures of the contemporary era. Major retrospectives at the Whitney, the Centre Pompidou, and the Guggenheim Bilbao have confirmed his position as one of the defining artists of his generation, and his works are held in the leading museums worldwide.