Sitting Ballerina

Mediums: inflatable nylon construction.
Location: the square in front of the Rockefeller Center, New York, the USA.

The figure of a 13-meter-tall ballerina sitting on an ottoman was installed on a square in New York in the spring of 2017. On the very first day, a scandal erupted around the work, as the ballerina’s sculpture turned out to be an exact copy of the statuette of Soviet artist Oksana Zhnikrup “Ballerina Lenochka”. Jeff Koons, who was accused of plagiarism, claims that he was inspired by the old statuette to create the work and that he bought the rights to it from the heirs of the author who died in 1993. In the period from 2010 to 2015, Koons made several of the same statues of a much smaller size of wood, as well as from his favourite material – metal painted with mirror paint.