Jeff Koons is an American artist mostly known for his work among popular culture and his sculptures depicting everyday objects, he lives and works in both New York City and his hometown York in Pennsylvania. Koons was a student at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he studied painting, this is where he met his major influence of his works Ed Paschke who was also an American painter who held an interest in animation and cartoons.
In his early works, Koons worked on a series called the “Inflatable Series” which was four works that consisted of inflatable flowers and a rabbit which were made with various colours and heights and then positioned with mirrors, creating works in the style of balloons is something Koons did a lot, creating things such as balloon animals which he made using stainless steel and finishing it with mirror-like surfaces whilst using bright eye catching colours.
Releasing his works in series was something Koons chose to do and a lot of them included the large balloon like objects and were something that were largely popular to the public too with his works, selling for enormous sums, two of them been the biggest of sums as they sold for a record breaking amount for a living artist with his “Balloon Dog (Orange)” selling for $58.4 million in 2013 and “Rabbit” selling for $91.1 million in 2019. However, though Koons had a lot of people who loved his work, he had a lot of critics for multiple reasons, some describing his work as “Baloney” “Dreadful” and full of “cheap, tone deaf, misogynistic images” and some see his work as easy and cheaply made, dull and pointless, which goes against the norms of what people expect within a piece of art, whilst then selling for eye watering amounts of money. One other major controversy with Koons was plagiarism, which is something Koons has been heavily accused of and in a few cases, been found guilty of having lost cases of copyright infringement and plagiarism, in some peoples opinions copying is what Koons style is, simply taking everyday objects or something he has seen and enlarging them and calling it art.
The word “Kitsch” came from the 19th century and is used to describe a piece of art of being in poor taste and looked mediocre, in simpler terms just lacks quality, in Germany the word “verkitschen” means to make something cheap, Koons art was also referred to as Kitsch by some. However, some people actually tend to enjoy Kitsch art as it simply looks funny.
Maximalism is a reaction against minimalism. In graphic design to create a maximalist piece of work you are to use oversaturated colours and bold patterns and fill every bit of the page. Maximalism allows designers to be free and go wild with their ideas and imaginations, to ignore the normal boundaries of design.
Within my designs I explored all of Jeff Koons, Kitsch design and Maximalism. For my first design I took inspiration from Jeff Koons’ work “Play Doh” by using the bright highly saturated colours in his work and creating blocks of colours and organising them in the way to make it look like my dogs fur, my thought of behind this was to combine two of his ideas and turn it into one, one idea been the “Play Doh” and the other his “Balloon Dogs.”
My second piece was my attempt at making a digital version of a Jeff Koons Balloon/ Inflatable piece, I decided to recreate a popular pop art illustration and then in illustrator inflated it which resulted in it looking similar to his Balloon pieces, I also decided to do this as pop art is a heavy theme throughout pop art, and the “Pop!” illustration is arguably one of the more popular phrases in pop art.
For my third piece I created a piece more of what people may describe as Kitsch due to its bleak and ugly colour palette. furthermore, when researching Kitsch design i often found the facial features looked over exaggerated or unnatural and quite creepy looking, hence why i enlarged the eye on my dog to make it look unnatural and follow that theme.
For my final piece i made a piece in the style of maximalism by using a piece i created back in the covid days and adding patterns and text to it, using oversaturated and bright colours and using every bit of the page whilst also trying to send an important message.
Images can be found here:
https://www.canva.com/learn/maximalism/
https://www.fulltable.com/vts/k/kts/k.htm
Sites used for research can be found here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Koons