Jeff Koons (Né en 1955)

The American mega gallery announced in a press release that they will now represent the famous artist internationally and exclusively. Jeff Koons thus leaves the David Zwirner and Gagosian galleries, with which he collaborated until now.

Since 1975, BMW has commissioned blue-chip artists such as Warhol, Rauschenberg & Cao Fei, to create iterations of a BMW vehicle. Now, for the second time, Jeff Koons has been asked to design BMW’s 8-Series Grand Coupe sports sedan. It was unveiled on Wednesday in connection with Frieze LA, for which BMW is a partner.

The dispute began when Koons’ Balloon Venus was damaged during transportation between the Taunus region and a Düsseldorf gallery, in Germany. The owner of the work sued the gallery for €50,000 in damages, saying the sculpture’s work has quartered in value. The courts will soon settle the dispute.  

The suit, which began in 2018, accuses the defendants of neglecting to follow an agreed schedule for the delivery of three sculptures by Koons, for which Tananbaum allegedly paid over $13 million. Gagosian announced last week its intention to appeal the New York Supreme Court’s decision to allow the case to proceed.

The world's most well-known artist has announced that he will send a group of sculptures to the moon this year, in a partnership with Intuitive Machines. They will be transported aboard the Nova C Lunar Lander and kept in situ in a satellite. More details of the project are forthcoming. 

This Tuesday, Paris’ Court of Appeal found Jeff Koons guilty of copying an advert by clothing brand Naf-Naf, confirming a November 2018 court ruling. The porcelain sculpture was displayed in a 2014 retrospective of Koons’ work at the Pompidou Center, and the museum itself will have to pay €190,000 in damages.

Jeff Koons lost a 25-year legal battle. He maintains that a sculpture of two snakes is falsely attributed to him. The Milan court finds him wrong and supports the Italian collector who acquired the piece at an auction in 1991.

The special edition BMW, whose finish reportedly “combines 11 different hues into a multilayered paint that takes 285 hours to apply to each car” will premier at Frieze LA in February 2022 and be available in limited numbers. The Koons previously worked with BMW on its Art Car, for the 24hrs Le Mans race in 2010.

He told Le Figaro that he did not choose the originally proposed location (outside the Palais de Tokyo) criticized by art world officials as “product placement”. The imposing sculpture, intended as a symbol of American solidarity following the 2015 Paris attacks, is now installed in a garden behind the Petit Palais.

In May 2019, Koons’ Rabbit matched the price of David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (1972), which sold for $80 M in November 2018. An increase in buyer’s fees at Christie’s between November 2018 and November 2019 resulted in Koons edging past Hockney to claim the title alone, according to Artprice.