The artist is being sued by a photographer who claims that Koons’s 1986 work I Could Go For Something Gordon’s used his photograph without permission

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Jeff Koons, a US pop artist whose works can fetch millions, is facing allegations he used a New York photographer’s commercial photo from the 1980s in a painting without permission or compensation, according to a lawsuit filed Monday.

The photographer, Mitchel Gray, said in the complaint filed in Manhattan federal court that Koons reproduced his photo, which depicts a man sitting beside a woman painting on a beach with an easel, “nearly unchanged and in its entirety”.

Gray is also suing New York-based auction house Phillips Auctioneers and an as-yet-unnamed former owner of the Koons print, which sold for $2.04m in London in 2008.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest I Could Go For Something Gordon’s. Photograph: © Jeff Koons

Neither Koons nor his agent in New York could immediately be reached on Monday.

Phillips Auctioneers spokesman Michael Sherman said in an email: “(W)e are confident that Phillips has no liability in this matter.”

Koons, one of the world’s most celebrated contemporary artists, is best known for his colourful paintings, monumental reflective sculptures and inflatable flowers.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The original Gordon’s gin advert. Photograph: eBay

His work Balloon Dog (Orange) sold for $58.4m in 2013, the highest price for a living artist’s work sold at auction.

Gray’s photo was published in an advertisement for Gordon’s Dry Gin in 1986. Later that year, the complaint alleged, Koons reproduced the photo in a painting called I Could Go For Something Gordon’s. It was part of a series of liquor-themed paintings called Luxury and Degradation.

Gray did not discover Koons’s work until July of this year, the complaint said.

There is a three-year statute of limitations on copyright actions, but “the clock doesn’t start ticking until the plaintiff learns of the infringement”, his lawyer, Jordan Fletcher, of the law firm Kushnirsky Gerber, said in an interview.

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Gray is seeking unspecified damages and any profits the defendants received from the suspected infringement. He said he also deserves punitive damages because the infringement was willful.

Koons “knew, or should have known, that he was required to obtain an artist’s permission before he could lawfully copy a work by that artist,” the lawsuit said.

Koons has been sued for copyright infringement several times before, losing twice in the early ’90s; once for appropriating a photographer’s image in his sculpture String of Puppies and once for using the image of the Garfield character Odie.

Much of his work involves the reinterpretation of sources from elsewhere. His most recent works, the Gazing Ball Paintings, are versions of old masters including the Mona Lisa, repainted and with a blue sphere inserted in the centre.

Deflecting allegations of copying, Koons said of the Gazing Ball Paintings that artists reference one another all the time. It remains to be seen whether this argument will stand up in court.