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Since the late 1980s, Jeff Koons has represented a range of dogs in his work. From the Banality series in 1988, which featured the porcelain sculptures, Puppy, Wild Boy, and String of Puppies, to Made in Heaven in 1989, which included five different forms, including a wooden West Highland White Terrier (or Norwich Terrier), Koons has celebrated canines and presented them as accessible avatars for general audiences to enter the art world.

Perhaps the pinnacle of Koons' fascination with the dog as subject came in 1992, when he created Puppy, a monumental sculpture standing forty-three feet high of a West Highland White Terrier covered in live-growing, flowering plants: petunias, begonias, lobelias, impatiens, and marigolds. Initially created from stainless steel, wood, soil, and geotextile fabric, Koons also gave Puppy its own internal irrigation system.

“A West Highland Terrier seems neutral," Koons has said, "which is good, because I don't want anyone in the audience to feel alienated.”

Of the dog breed, Koons has said, “A West Highland Terrier seems neutral […] which is good, because I don't want anyone in the audience to feel alienated.” More than a grandiose public artwork, Koons considers Puppy “a very spiritual piece,” a constructed metaphor: “Puppy is a shelter. It's built out of stainless steel. It's like the fuselage of an airplane. You could live inside it.”

This adorable yet imposing composition was first installed in the front courtyard of the Baroque/Rococo castle, Residenzschloss Arolsen, in Hesse, Germany, not far from Kessel, where Documenta IX took place simultaneously from June 13 through September 20, 1992. Koons subsequently painted both an artist's proof and a single large-form, photorealistic rendering of this installation. The present lot is Koons' artist's proof painting of Puppy.

Although Koons was not one of the participating artists at Documenta IX, his Puppy caused quite a stir, as over 20,000 visitors came to view his massive topiary dog sculpture, including many who were attending Documenta IX. In 1992, the artistic director for Documenta IX was Jan Hoet, who gave the exhibition its motto, “From body to body to bodies.” Hoet elaborated on this concept, explaining: “At a time in which the human race is confronted more than ever with such dangers as AIDS and multinational wars, nuclear catastrophes, and global climate disasters, at a time in which threats are growing increasingly abstract and the fears more and more diffuse, I see reflection on the physical conditions of life as an appropriate answer.”

Watch art critic Jerry Saltz discuss Jeff Koons' Puppy

Ever the provocateur, Koons might have intended Puppy to provide a mirthful counter to the somber, academic imperatives of Documenta IX. Nevertheless, the living, flowering nature of his colossal canine does seem an inspired response to notions of abstract fear and environmental collapse. Beyond expanding the audience for his art, Koons achieved in the striking spectacle of Puppy a means by which viewers would have no choice but to stop, smile, and marvel. Furthermore, the setting for the installation was not an accident either.

In placing a towering puppy adorned with flowers in front of Residenzschloss Arolsen—for centuries a symbol of aristocratic opulence and intellectual refinement — Koons implied that the future of art and even the fate of civilization should be shaped from the ground up, as an organic, democratic process.

Following its stay in Germany, Puppy was relocated to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney and Rockefeller Center in New York City before reaching its permanent home, as of 1997, the Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, where it continues to delight visitors and serve as a universal symbol of hope. The floral composition of Puppy evokes the tradition of formal, topiary gardens in vogue during the 18th century, but its playful subject and absurd size transcend any possibility of exclusivity. Whether standing guard in front of an Old World castle in Germany or the postmodern Guggenheim in Spain, Puppy generates a pleasing sense of dislocation, not unlike the Surrealism of one of Koons' artistic heroes, Salvador Dalí.

Similar to Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons is considered one of the best marketers of his own work, someone with seemingly few qualms about conflating art and commerce. In addition to the monumental sculpture of Puppy, Koons also produced smaller-scale editions—in particular, porcelain sculptures, miniature replicas, and decorative plates—to allow collectors to live with a piece of his broad-minded vision. Of course, even within the aesthetics of mass appeal, there remains a hierarchy. No one really owns Koons' forty-three-foot, flowering sculpture of Puppy and only two paintings exist of the original installation in Germany, including the present lot.