Jeff Koons

Balloon Dog (Red) is a miniature version of Jeff Koons’s iconic ten-foot-tall cast stainless steel balloon dogs, made from 1994 to 2000. For these sculptures the artist appropriates “balloon modeling”-an activity usually practiced by clowns at children’s birthday parties-into the realm of high art, thus parodying the traditions of sculptural fabrication and reproduction. Koons worked as a Wall Street commodities broker before becoming an artist in the 1980s. He has since taken “appropriation art,” which borrows subject matter and techniques from visual culture, to extreme degrees to distort and reflect an American appetite for consumerism.