Jeffrey Koons is an American artist known for working with popular culture subjects and his reproductions of banal objects, such as balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror-finish surfaces. Since his first solo exhibition in 1980, his work has evolved from small-scale assemblages of toys and found objects to his now iconic monumental works, including huge balloon animals rendered in mirror-polished stainless steel, as well as flowering topiary sculptures, such as Puppy (1992), which is permanently installed at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Between 1977 and 1979 Koons produced four separate artworks, which he later referred to as Early Works. Starting from 1978 he worked on his Inflatables series, consisting of inflatable flowers and a rabbit of various heights and colors, positioned along with mirrors. Paintings and sculptures from the Popeye series, which Koons began in 2002, feature the cartoon figures of Popeye and Olive Oyl. One such item is a stainless steel reproduction of a mass-market PVC Popeye figurine. The artist will also make use of inflatable animals again, this time in combination with ladders, trashcans and fences. To create these sculptures, the toys get a layer of coating after finding the right shape. Then a hard copy is made and sent to the foundry to be cast in aluminum. Back in the studio the sculptures are painted in order to achieve the shiny look of the original inflatables. For these surrealist installations, Acrobat in particular, Koons got inspiration from the Chicago Imagist H.C. Westermann.