Throughout the 1980s Jeff Koons constructed an art that drew on aspects of consumer culture, including the artificial glamour imposed on domesticity by the advertising industry. Rather than critiquing this materialism, Koons conflated advertising’s marketing strategies with the strident individualism of the New York art scene at that time, resulting in a body of highly ironic works.

This portfolio of commercially printed lithographs illustrates willingness on Koons’s part to defy artistic conventions and become the subject of his own advertising. These images, published as a limited-edition portfolio by the artist’s New York representative in November 1988, were subsequently placed as advertisements in various international art journals over the following year. By flagrantly exposing the fictions of originality that continue to support the art market and simultaneously exploiting his own reputation as an ‘enfant terrible’, Koons has managed to work within an existing cultural system while subverting some of its most precious tenets.