On the eve of a surprise Oxford show, the artist gives us a tour of his vast studio – and talks about inflatable metaphors and the controversy over his giant tulips
‘To get great clarity in the balls, you really need to blow them a lot,” says Jeff Koons, with all the solemnity of a man explaining his tax returns. He gazes lovingly at his balls, which in this particular case are a row of stainless steel spheres suitably blown up to bear an astonishing resemblance to his most famous artistic muse: inflatable rubber toys. But given that Koons shot to notoriety with his 1991 series Made in Heaven – in which he photographed himself and his then girlfriend Ilona Staller in pretty much every sexual position legal in the state of New York – this ball chat really could have gone another way.
Koons, who looks like Pee Wee Herman and talks like Mister Rogers, is taking me around his 10,000 square foot studio in Chelsea, New York. And if you think that sounds big, wait until you hear about his house: he, his wife Justine and their six children (Koons also has two older children from previous relationships) are about to move into their new fixer-upper, which is almost an entire block on the Upper East Side. Koons bought two mega mansions for a total of $35m and spent almost another $5m knocking them together.
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