Koons, Jeff (1955- ), American sculptor, who achieved renown in the 1980s with a series of works that referred, often outrageously, to the imagery of popular culture. Born in York, Pennsylvania, he trained between 1972 and 1975 at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, Baltimore, and the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, where he was a student of American pop artist Ed Paschke. In 1976 Koons moved to New York City, where for a time he worked at the Stock Exchange. However, during the 1980s he gained international fame for his deliberately tasteless, sometimes pornographic, art.

Inspired primarily by the pop artists of the 1960s (see Pop Art), Koons became interested in the pervasive influence of consumerism in modern society. His work of the early 1980s, which imitates the imagery of advertising, often incorporates household products, such as the vacuum cleaners that he exhibited at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York (1980), or the basketballs submerged in aquariums from his Equilibrium series (1985). These pieces are examples of conceptualism, which holds that the artist's concepts form the substance of an artwork, rather than more traditional concerns such as aesthetics or craftsmanship. Koons also follows the modern practice of making art from so-called found objects, an innovation pioneered by French artist Marcel Duchamp , who in 1917 exhibited a common urinal he had signed and entitled Fountain.

In the late 1980s Koons's work turned to questioning the public conception of acceptable subject matter for art. His most controversial creations of this period were part of the Made in Heaven series (1992), a collection of sexually explicit photographs and sculptures of himself and his wife, Italian pornographic actor La Cicciolina, whom he had married in 1991. In these pieces, Koons challenged conventional definitions of bad taste based on social class, exploring whether or not they should limit what is accepted as art.