Balloon Dog, red and silver lacquered, 1995

Jeff Koons is an American artist currently holds the record for ‘most expensive piece sold by a living artist’. He takes pleasure in producing pieces that some erudite art critics might describe as being ‘low art.’ His artistry, concerned with ordinary, everyday objects, is often represented in his signature style, recreating balloon animals and figures in metallic, brightly-colored finishes. Koon’s record-breaking piece Rabbit is a stainless-steel recreation of a rabbit in balloon form, and sold in May of 2019 for $91 million. Throughout the years he has produced and organized his works into several series, including the Statuary series that Rabbit was a part of, the Banality series inspired by Hummel figurines, and the Celebration series that focused on recreations of inflatable dogs.

Balloon Dog (Red and silver lacquered) features a limited-edition balloon animal dog rendered in the artist’s emblematic metallic and reflective material. The bright red mirror-finish surface of the dog combined with that of the silver plate behind it has a magnifying and distorting effect, playing with the space and weight of the piece. Although being one of the artist’s hallmarks, Koons has denied that the dog holds some hidden symbolism describing his sculpture as ‘a symbol of us’.