‘We are inflatables,’ Jeff Koons declared to the curator Norman Rosenthal in 2014. ‘As human beings, we can take a deep breath. That’s a symbol of optimism and potential, and if we exhale, we deflate ourselves.’

Arguably, no other series of artworks created during the past half century has caused as much debate — or broken as many records — as Koons’s ‘inflatable’ sculptures, which are both the genesis and pinnacle of his career.

On 9 October 2024, Koons’s monumental Balloon Monkey (Blue) (2006-13) will be offered in Christie’s 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale. One of five unique versions of a work considered a touchstone of his career, it was the anchor of his 2021-22 exhibition Shine at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence.

Koons’s early inflatable experiments

In 1977, having earned a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Koons moved to New York City. Keen to attract attention at his new job — working the membership desk at the city’s Museum of Modern Art — he dyed his hair red, grew a pencil moustache and, most significantly, tied an inflatable flower around his neck.

The flower was one of many inflatables he bought from the local dollar store, along with elephants, pandas and rabbits. Back in his East Village apartment, he began arranging them between porcelain trinkets, then mirrors, experimenting with Marcel Duchamp’s theory of ‘readymades’.