Jeff Koons</a>. Koons, long known for works that reinvent readymade sources, took inspiration from a small porcelain ballerina figurine utilizing cutting edge technology.</p><p>Since his emergence in the 1980s, Jeff Koons has blended the concerns and methods of Pop, Conceptual, and the readymade with craft-making and popular culture to create his own unique iconography, often controversial and always engaging. His work explores contemporary obsessions with sex and desire; race and gender; and celebrity, media, commerce, and fame. These themes are fused through the iconography and materials used in his creations, whose painstaking finishes are achieved with the help of his studio and skilled fabricators, an invaluable tool for the artist. Focusing on some of the most unexpected objects as models for his work, Koons' works eschew typical standards of "good taste" in art and zero in rather precisely on the vulnerabilities of hierarchies and value systems.</p><p>Seated Ballerina is one of Koons’s latest sculpture in his Antiquity series, begun in 2008. The series explores themes such as beauty, fertility, love, and the connectivity in the artistic dialogue that spans the history of man.</p>" />