Rabbit, Jeff Koons’ Signature

Jeff Koons’ works have long been anchored in the contemporary art landscape. With a plethora of colors, a falsely naive adoption of the enthusiasm of childhood, chrome and steel, Jeff Koons is an artist who, to denounce the vacuity of consumer society, sculpts shapes as universal as they are elementary. In 1986, at the dawning of his career, the American artist began his body of work with Rabbit, a work of art inspired by an inflatable toy. But Koons was then first and foremost a radical artist, and so he introduced his piece in a version with larger-than-life dimensions – an ordinary rabbit thus transformed a work of art by Jeff Koons, then the work of art itself transformed into entertainment that, once inside the greatest museums, became venerable art once more.

This inflatable Rabbit made of stainless steel comes directly from his memories of a bazaar. This emblematic artwork, with its minimal lines and the purity of its shapes gives off a softness, a roundness, and a calm that seems to fit with childhood. This is exactly what Jeff Koons seeks to elicit with the spectator: a lost insouciance – “I think one of the reasons why Rabbit is an emblematic artwork, a popular piece, is that it’s truly a chameleon. You can look at it and think of the Easter Resurrection, you can look at it and think of it the Playboy bunny, you can also look at it and find that the carrot looks like a microphone and think of an orator, a preacher. So it’s truly a chameleon. The works have to be chameleons to become emblematic or archetypal, since it’s essential that they never cease to evolve, transform, and respond to the spectator’s needs.”

The iconography of global pop culture is the language chosen by Jeff Koons to bring different artistic heritages into dialogue. Establishing himself as an avant-gardiste, he evokes dadaism and the surrealists, bumping elbows with Duchamp, Dali, and Magritte. Koons indeed picked up where Marcel Duchamp’s ready-made left off; he also took inspiration from the enormous dimensions that Claes Oldenburg gave to everyday objects, appropriating in the same breath Arman’s principle of accumulation. Often wrongly considered as being ironic or vain, Jeff Koons’ art insists on an optimistic vision and a reappraisal of what constitutes good and bad taste, blurring the lines between the adult world and that of children.

Although Jeff Koons is the most expensive living artist in the world, it is nonetheless regularly subject to controversy. His works, described as “kitsch” and “neo-pop”, depict American icons, Objects of everyday life – from childhood also as his Dog Balloon . In 2017, he designed five bags for Louis Vuitton, including famous paintings: Mars, Venus and Cupid of Titian … to be discovered here.