Justine Koons

Justine Koons, born Justine Wheeler, is a multidisciplinary artist from Johannesburg, South Africa who now lives and works in New York with her husband Jeff Koons and their six children. After graduating from art school at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, Koons exhibited in the first Johannesburg Biennial (1994) where she met several New York artists who traveled to South Africa and encouraged her to visit NYC.

In 1995, she moved to New York City where she immersed herself in the 1990s art scene, soon becoming acquainted with the debates of the time: questions of authorship, identity, and criticality. In these years, she continued to make artwork while also showing in and organizing exhibitions (one, in Cape Town [2000], included her work alongside Kara Walker, Cecily Brown, and Lisa Brice.) Justine met Jeff Koons in the fall of 1995 and--initially hired as an assistant with his studio --she soon managed the entirety of his sculpture department, working with a team of one hundred to realize the now-iconic Celebration series--Tulips, Balloon Flower, and Play-Doh sculptures. This seminal period shaped her perspective on her own practice: when not busy overseeing the demands of the studio, she continued to make her own sculpture, jewelry, and paintings. Justine and Jeff married in 2002 and their children were born during this decade. After the birth of her last son, in 2012, Koons began to process the onset of postpartum depression by returning to her studio practice: “I had to save myself somehow, and the only way I knew was to be back in the studio.”

She has made multiple bodies of work in New York across media, but a throughline in her practice has been the refinement of artmaking as a conceptual and embodied process. This period has offered an important reappraisal for the whole of her own practice, speaking deeply to the expectations and perceptions of an artist’s studio practice and exhibition practice—making and showing where, and for whom?—and the myths that surround art and family life. Koons began to directly address those myths frequently attributed to and associated with artists, mothers, women, muses, lovers, and creators. What happens when each independent mythic trope becomes incompatible with the others when amalgamated within one person?

Since 2017, Koons has been dedicated to working with ceramics, creating stoneware works that have spanned both functional objects and large sculptural figures. She has frequently depicted stories of women from across mythology and art history—Amazon warriors, Venuses, and bodies from classical sculpture. Like Aphrodite’s ascension from the sea foam, the pictorialism of Koons’ sculptures emerge from the material as a second act of creation—an ongoing exchange between figure and ground, and the interplay between background and foreground. “The act of looking becomes a complex interplay of desire, judgment, and reflection, prompting us to examine our own identities and the personas we craft in response to the world around us.”