A Child Could Do It! Jeff Koons $20m Play-Doh Sculpture Auctioned

Jeff Koons Play-Doh Photo © Artlyst

A Jeff Koons sculpture depicting a pile of Play-Doh is to go under the hammer at Christie’s. It will carry a hefty guide price of $20 million. The work of art was inspired by his young son, while in Rome married to the adult film star and Italian MP Ilona Staller AKA Cicciolina.

‘What I try to do every day as an artist, to make objects that you can’t make any judgements about’ – Jeff Koons

It took Koons two decades to realise the sculpture due to technical problems and it was finally completed in 2014, crafted in separate aluminium pieces which fit together like a puzzle.

This is the first time the work of art, part of the “Celebration” series,” and produced in an edition of 5 unique versions, is to go under the hammer. Christie’s will host the sale, part of the property of a European collection, later this Spring.

The sculpture will be available for public viewing ahead of the May 17 auction at Christie’s in New York’s Rockefeller Center from April 13 to April 19, April 28 to May 5 and one last time before the sale, from May 12 to May 17.

The ten-foot-high sculpture is made from twenty-seven pieces of cast-painted aluminium. His toddler son Ludwig. “created a haystack shaped pile of play-doh. Koons recalls his son saying, ‘Dad!’ I turned, ‘What?’ And he went, ‘Voila!’ in front of the mound of play-doh,” Koons explained to the New Yorker in 2007. “And he was so proud. And I looked at it, and I thought, you know this is really what I try to do every day as an artist, to make objects that you can’t make any judgements about.”

Jeff Koons was born in York, Pennsylvania, in 1955. He studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He received a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1976. Since his first solo exhibition in 1980, Koons’s work has been shown in major galleries and institutions throughout the world. A full survey of Koons’s career was the subject of a major exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, which travelled to the Centre Pompidou in Paris and to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Koons lives and works in New York City.

Top Photo: P C Robinson © Artlyst 2018 – Jeff Koons, Play-Doh, 1994–2014. Polychromed aluminium; 120 × 108 × 108 in. (304.8 × 274.3 × 274.3 cm) sculpture © Jeff Koons.

 

Jeff Koons discusses Play-Doh and Real-Doh at the Whitney Museum

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