Giant sculpture of Michael Jackson and his pet chimpanzee is one of the items being displayed by a 57-year-old American who combines the divine with sexuality

Love him or hate him, there is no escaping Jeff Koons, the king of pornographic kitsch, in Frankfurt these days.

Oversized posters line the river front and are plastered across every metro station in the city proclaiming “Wow” or “Must See” for what is being hailed as the biggest-ever show of works by the 57-year-old American pop artist.

The Schirn Kunsthalle, one of the city’s two museums for contemporary art, is hosting Koons, The Painter, with a total 45 canvasses on display, while the small and genteel Liebieghaus, on the south bank of the Main, is showing 44 works of Koons, The Sculptor.

The spectacular double exhibition, which is expected to break all attendance records at both houses, runs until September 23.

Pennsylvania-born Mr Koons, whose works regularly fetch astronomical prices at auction, is perhaps most notorious for a series of sexually explicit paintings, photographs and sculptures entitled Made in Heaven in 1990-91 with his then Hungarian-Italian partner, porn-star Ilona Staller or Cicciolina.

A small selection of the pictures from the series are on display in a separate room at the Schirn.

But his outsized paintings and sculptures of objects from trivial culture − inflatable dolphins, balloon bunnies and cartoon figures such as Popeye and the Incredible Hulk − have led his work to be dismissed as vapid or mere merchandising in art circles.

One of the main attractions in the Liebieghaus is a gigantic cream and golden porcelain sculpture of Michael Jackson and his pet chimpanzee Bubbles.

Mr Koons coolly dismisses his critics. “Kitsch is a word of judgement. I don’t believe in judgement,” he told reporters at a special press viewing ahead of the official opening.

“I want to show what it means to be human. I like shiny surfaces, to affirm the viewer: you are here.”

The Liebieghaus’s curator, Vinzenz Brinkmann, said that “from a certain point of view, Mr Koons is the last artist of the antiquity,” because he, like the ancient sculptors, “shared an interest in the quest for perfection, for craftsmanship and a love of flamboyant colours”.

And like them, too, he combined the divine with sexuality, in contrast to the philosophy of Christianity, Mr Brinkmann said.

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