| Rabbit | |
|---|---|
| Artist | Jeff Koons |
| Year | 1986 |
| Medium | Stainless steel sculpture |
| Subject | Rabbit |
Rabbit is a 1986 series of three identical stainless steel sculptures by Jeff Koons. One of the editions of Rabbit is the most expensive work sold by a living artist at auction, being sold for $91.1 million in May 2019. [1]
In May 2019, the sculpture was auctioned for $91.1 million, breaking the auction record for an artwork by a living artist. [2] The work, which was sold by the estate of the late magazine publisher S. I. Newhouse, was one in an edition of three (plus an artist's proof) and the last still held in private hands. [3] It was later revealed that the art dealer Robert Mnuchin purchased the work for the billionaire hedge fund manager Steven A. Cohen. [4]
In the initial sale of the work, Koons's art dealer Ileana Sonnabend kept one edition and sold the other two for $40,000 each: to the advertising magnate Charles Saatchi, and the painter Terry Winters. [5] In 1991, Saatchi sold the piece to American collector Stefan Edlis for $945,000. [6] Around the same period, Larry Gagosian brokered the deal between Winters and Newhouse, for $1 million. [7] In 2011, at Abu Dhabi Art, Gagosian remembered it as his favorite art deal and "the one transaction that stands out the most." Gagosian regretted not being able buy the piece himself, stating it was "a startling price at the time, a million dollars."
After Sonnabend's death in October 2007, her heirs sold her edition of the piece as part of a package of art works for $400 million to GPS Partners – set up by the art dealers Philippe Ségalot, Lionel Pissarro, and Franck Giraud, on behalf of a consortium of collectors including Carlos Slim, Sammy Ofer, François Pinault, and Qatar's ruling Al Thani family. [2]
In 2000, Edlis's edition of Rabbit was given as a partial donation to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, where it is still on display. [6]
The other edition of Rabbit is part of the permanent collection of The Broad in Los Angeles, where it is on view to the public as part of the museum's collection of Koons works. [8]
Damien Steven Hirst is an English artist and art collector. He is one of the Young British Artists (YBAs) who dominated the art scene in the UK during the 1990s. He is reportedly the United Kingdom's richest living artist, with his wealth estimated at US$384 million in the 2020 Sunday Times Rich List. During the 1990s his career was closely linked with the collector Charles Saatchi, but increasing frictions came to a head in 2003 and the relationship ended.
Jennifer Anne Saville is a contemporary British painter and an original member of the Young British Artists. Saville works and lives in Oxford, England and she is known for her large-scale painted depictions of nude women. Saville has been credited with originating a new and challenging method of painting the female nude and reinventing figure painting for contemporary art. Some paintings are of small dimensions, while other are of much larger scale. Monumental subjects come from pathology textbooks that she has studied that informed her on injury to bruise, burns, and deformity. John Gray commented: "As I see it, Jenny Saville's work expresses a parallel project of reclaiming the body from personality. Saville worked with many models who under went cosmetic surgery to reshape a portion of their body. In doing that, she captures "marks of personality for the flesh" and together embraces how we can be the writers of our own lives."
Rogers v. Koons, 960 F.2d 301, is a leading U.S. court case on copyright, dealing with the fair use defense for parody. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit found that an artist copying a photograph could be liable for infringement when there was no clear need to imitate the photograph for parody.
The Gagosian Gallery is a contemporary art gallery owned and directed by Larry Gagosian. The gallery exhibits some of the most influential artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. There are 16 gallery spaces – five in New York City, three in London, two in Paris, and one each in Basel, Beverly Hills, Rome, Athens, Geneva and Hong Kong.
Lawrence Gilbert "Larry" Gagosian is an American art dealer who owns the Gagosian Gallery chain of art galleries. Working in concert with collectors including Douglas S. Cramer, Eli Broad, and Keith Barish, he developed a reputation for staging museum-quality exhibitions of contemporary art.
Ileana Sonnabend was a Romanian-American art dealer of 20th-century art. The Sonnabend Gallery opened in Paris in 1962 and was instrumental in making American art of the 1960s known in Europe, with an emphasis on American pop art. In 1970, Sonnabend Gallery opened in New York on Madison Avenue, and in 1971 relocated to 420 West Broadway in SoHo where it was one of the major protagonists that made SoHo the international art center it remained until the early 1990s. The gallery was instrumental in making European art of the 1970s known in America, with an emphasis on European conceptual art and Arte Povera. It also presented American conceptual and minimal art of the 1970s. In 1986, the so-called "Neo-Geo" show introduced, among others, the artist Jeff Koons. In the late 1990s, the gallery moved to Chelsea and continues to be active after Sonnabend's death. The gallery goes on showing the work of artists who rose to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s including Robert Morris, Bernd and Hilla Becher and Gilbert & George as well as more recent artists including Jeff Koons, Rona Pondick, Candida Höfer, Elger Esser, and Clifford Ross.
Shot Marilyns is a series of silkscreen paintings produced in 1964 by Andy Warhol, each canvas measuring 40 inches square, and each a portrait of Marilyn Monroe.
Jeffrey Lynn Koons is an American 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$91.1 million for Rabbit in 2019.
Jose Mugrabi is an Israeli businessman and art collector of Syrian descent. with a family net worth estimated at 5$ billion. He is the leading collector of Andy Warhol, with 800 artworks.
Banality is a series of sculptures by American artist Jeff Koons. The works were unveiled in 1988 and have become controversial for their use of copyrighted images. Several editions of the sculptures have sold at auction for millions of dollars.
Robert E. Mnuchin is an American art dealer and former banker. After a 33-year career with Goldman Sachs, he retired to fund the Mnuchin Gallery in New York City.
Balloon Dog is a series of sculptures by the American artist Jeff Koons. There are different versions of this sculpture, made between 1994 and 2000, with each having a different color: blue, magenta, yellow, orange and red.
The Price of Everything is a 2018 American documentary film directed by Nathaniel Kahn and produced by Jennifer Blei Stockman, Debi Wisch, Carla Solomon and Katharina Otto-Bernstein for HBO.
The year 2019 in art involved various significant events.
Steven Andrew Tananbaum is an American hedge fund manager. He is the chief investment officer of GoldenTree Asset Management, which he co-founded in 2000. He manages the firm's investment team and oversees the executive committee. In 2018, Bloomberg referred to Tananbaum as "one of Wall Street’s biggest investors in distressed debt."
Adam Lindemann is a New York Based gallerist, art collector and writer who founded Venus Over Manhattan gallery in New York City in 2012. As an art collector and gallerist, Lindemann is known for setting multiple world records both at auction and privately, including career records for Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jean Royère.
Stefan Edlis was an Austrian born American art collector and philanthropist. As a collector he initially focused on Pop Art.
Olympics is a painting created by American artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol in 1984. The artwork was a commemoration of the 1984 Summer Olympics. It sold for $10.5 million at Phillips's Contemporary Art Evening Sale in June 2012, which at the time was a record high for a Warhol-Basquiat collaboration. It is the second most expensive Warhol-Basquiat collaboration sold at auction after Zenith (1985).
