NEW YORK, NY.- The American Friends of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (AFTAM) is pleased to announce its exclusive sale of Monkey Train (Blue), 2007, a limited-edition silkscreen print by Jeff Koons to benefit the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (TAMA). Koons, a recipient of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art’s Artist of the Year Award in 2007, has generously created a limited-edition of 40 of these original prints in support of AFTAM’s fundraising efforts on behalf of the Museum. Each silkscreen is printed on heavy, acid-free, archival paper and is signed, numbered, and dated in pencil. Individual prints will be offered unframed at a price of $30,000 ($5,000 tax-deductible).

“We are enormously grateful to Jeff Koons for providing us with the unprecedented opportunity to offer for sale a limited-edition series of works on paper by such a world renowned contemporary artist,” said Enid Shapiro, Executive Director of the American Friends of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Shapiro added, “Each print purchased will represent a significant contribution towards the continued growth of Israel’s leading museum of modern art as a dynamic international cultural institution that organizes roughly 25 temporary exhibitions yearly.”

Works by Koons have been consistently breaking auction records over the last 9 years. Marking the highest-priced work by a living artist sold at auction, Koons’ chromium stainless steel sculpture, Hanging Heart (Magenta/Gold), 1994-2006, sold at Sotheby’s for $23.56 million on November 14, 2007, trumping the artist's auction record-setting price of $11.8 million set at Christie's the previous day for Diamond (Blue), 1994-2005, another monumental, stainless steel sculpture, which is also part of the artist’s “Celebration” series. In 2001, Koons’ life-size porcelain statue, Michael Jackson and Bubbles,1988, part of the artist’s “Banality” series, sold at Sotheby’s for $5.6 million, breaking the auction record previously set for a work by the artist of $1.8 million in 1999.

Jeff Koons is recognized as one of America’s premier artists and his work is among the most expensive in the world of contemporary art with original pieces rarely selling below the $1-million mark, and series works significantly rising in value annually. His collectors top the art world’s “Who’s Who” list and include billionaire Eli Broad, Christie’s owner Francois Pinault, and hedge-fund manager David Ganek, among others.

Jeff Koons was born in 1955 in York, PA. 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. Koons has exhibited extensively around the world including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Francisco, the Stedelijk Museum, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Recent solo museum shows include the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin (2000), the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli (2003) and the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo (2004), which traveled to the Helsinki City Art Museum (2005). Koons lives and works in New York City.