FRANKFURT, Germany: Love him or hate him, there is no escaping Jeff Koons, the king of pornographic kitsch, in Frankfurt these days, with a mammoth double retrospective in two of the city’s main museums.

Ubiquitous oversized posters line the river front and are plastered across every metro station 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, opening here Wednesday.

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

The spectacular double exhibition, is expected to break all attendance records at both houses.

Pennsylvania-born Koons, whose works regularly fetch astronomic 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 partner, porn star Ilona Staller.

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

Koons coolly dismisses his critics.

“‘Kitsch’ is a word of judgment. I don’t believe in judgment,” 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.”

For the shows’ curators, Koons’ “works play with kitsch and commerce and is rich in art-historical associations. Koons makes references to important artists such as Marcel Duchamp or Andy Warhol, but also to the artistic styles of the baroque and the roccoco.”

The daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung was not convinced. “His art is madly elaborate and technically perfect and car designers can learn a lot from his obsessive handling of varnish and seemingly fluid steel. His works have an effect merely because you can’t overlook them. But ‘Must See’? No,” it wrote in a review.

But, the Liebieghaus’ curator, Vinzenz Brinkmann, said that “from a certain point of view, 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 colors.”