Jeffrey Lynn Koons (/kuːnz/; born January 21, 1955) is an artist recognized for his work dealing with popular culture and his sculptures depicting everyday objects, including balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror-finish surfaces. He lives and works in both New York City and his hometown of York, Pennsylvania. His works have sold for substantial sums, including at least two record auction prices for a work by a living artist: US$58.4 million for Balloon Dog (Orange) in 2013 and US$91.1 million for Rabbit in 2019.

Critics come sharply divided in their views of Koons. Some view his work as pioneering and of major art-historical importance. Others dismiss his work as kitsch, crass, and based on cynical self-merchandising. Koons has stated that there are no hidden meanings or critiques in his works.

Koons was born in York, Pennsylvania, to Henry Koons and Nancy Loomis. His father was a furniture dealer and interior decorator. His mother was a seamstress. When he was nine years old, his father would place old master paintings that Koons copied and signed in the window of his shop in an attempt to attract visitors. As a child he went door-to-door after school selling gift-wrapping paper and candy to earn pocket money. As a teenager he revered Salvador Dalí so much that he visited him at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City.

Koons studied painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore before transferring to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied from 1975 to 1976. While a student at the Art Institute, Koons met the artist Ed Paschke, who became a major influence and for whom Koons worked as a studio assistant in the late 1970s. He lived in Lakeview, and then in the Pilsen neighborhood at Halsted Street and 19th Street.

After college, Koons moved to New York in 1977 and worked at the membership desk of the Museum of Modern Art while establishing himself as an artist. During this time, he dyed his hair red and often wore a pencil mustache, after Salvador Dalí. In 1980, he became licensed to sell mutual funds and stocks and began working as a Wall Street commodities broker at First Investors Corporation. After a summer with his parents in Sarasota, Florida, where he briefly worked as a political canvasser, Koons returned to New York and found a new career as a commodities broker, first at Clayton Brokerage Company and then at Smith Barney.

Following his graduation from the Art Institute in Chicago in 1976, Koons made his way to New York City. There, he moved away from creating representations of his personal fantasies and began to explore objective art, commerce, and politics. He rose to prominence in the mid-1980s as part of a generation of artists who explored the meaning of art in a newly media-saturated era with his Pre-new The New series.With recognition came the establishment of a factory-like studio located in a loft at the corner of Houston Street and Broadway in New York in SoHo. It was staffed with over 30 assistants, each assigned to a different aspect of producing his work—in a similar mode as Andy Warhol's Factory. Koons's work is produced using a method known as art fabrication. Until 2019, Koons had a 1,500 m² (16,000 sq ft) studio factory near the old Hudson rail yards in Chelsea employing 90 to 120 assistants to produce his work. More recently, Koons has downsized staffing and shifted to more automated forms of production and relocated to a much smaller studio space. He now uses technology to create his artistic references on computers and color-corrects them until he is satisfied with the results. To ensure consistency, Koons implemented a color-by-numbers system, so that each of his assistants could execute his canvases and sculptures as if they had been done "by a single hand". Throughout his career, he has consistently explored themes such as consumerist behavior, seduction, banality, and childhood, among others.

Jeff Koons first began experimenting with the use of ready-made objects and modes of display in his apartment in 1976. His fascination with the extravagant world of luxurious goods and their more affordable counterparts led him to collect items like toys, metallic finishes, leopard skin, and porcelain. Between 1977 and 1979 Koons produced four separate artworks, which he later referred to as Early Works. In 1978 he began working on his Inflatables series, consisting of inflatable flowers and a rabbit of various heights and colors, positioned along with mirrors. Koons drew inspiration from Robert Smithson's emphasis on display and connected his work to his father's furniture store displays. He documented his work through photography, using it as a means of exploring different installation techniques.

Since 1979 Koons has produced work within series. His early work was in the form of conceptual sculpture, an example of which is The Pre-New, a series of domestic objects attached to light fixtures, resulting in strange new configurations. Another example is The New, a series of vacuum-cleaners, often selected for brand names that appealed to the artist like the iconic Hoover, which he had mounted in illuminated Perspex boxes. Koons first exhibited these pieces in the window of the New Museum in New York in 1980. He chose a limited combination of vacuum cleaners and arranged them in cabinets accordingly, juxtaposing the verticality of the upright cleaners with the squat cylinders of the "Shelton Wet/Dry drum" cleaners. At the museum, the machines were displayed as if in a showroom, and oriented around a central red fluorescent lightbox with just the words "The New" written on it as if it were announcing some new concept or marketing brand. They were shown again in a major solo show at Jeff Koons: The New Encased Works at Daniel Weinberg Gallery in 1987.