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Jeff Koons's “Split-Rocker” made its New York City debut at Rockefeller Center, to coincide with the opening of his retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Presented by Gagosian Gallery and organized by Public Art Fund and Tishman Speyer, “Split-Rocker” is a spectacular planted form that towers over 37 feet high and features over 50,000 flowering plants. Consistent with Koons’s persistent fascination with dichotomy and the in-between, the inspiration for “Split-Rocker” came when he decided to split and combine two similar but different toy rockers, a pony belonging to his son and a dinosaur (“Dino”). The slippage or “split” between the different halves of the heads gives an almost Cubist aspect to the composition. As the model was enlarged to the scale of a small house, the split became an opening, a profile, and a light shaft. In contrast to his legendary “Puppy” of 1992, which was presented by Public Art Fund at Rockefeller Center in the summer of 2000, “Split-Rocker” suggests the idea of a fantasy shelter. Whereas the singular form of “Puppy” is closed and sculptural, the combined form of Split-Rocker is architectural and hollow.

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Jeff Koons was born in 1955 in York, Pennsylvania. He received his B.F.A. at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Since his emergence in the 1980s Jeff Koons has blended the concerns and methods of Pop, Conceptual, and appropriation art 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. Since his first solo show in 1980, Koons's work has been widely exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions.

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