Jeff Koons was born in York, Pennsylvania. Koons attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he studied painting. He gained recognition in the 1980's, and subsequently set up a factory-like studio in a SoHo loft in New York.
Koons early work was in the form of conceptual sculpture. Koons carefully cultivated his public persona by employing an image consultant-something that at the time was unheard of for a contemporary artist.
Koons then moved on to "Statuary", the large stainless-steel blowups of toys, and then a series "Banality", which culminated in 1988 with Michael Jackson and Bubbles stated to be the world's largest ceramic.
Among curators and art collectors and others in the art world, Koons' work is labeled as Neo-pop or Post-Pop, as part of an 80's movement in reaction to the pared-down art of Minimalism and Conceptualism of the previous decade.