Depending on whom you ask, Jeff Koons is either one of the most brilliant artists alive or one of the most irritating. Either way, he has been among the most influential figures in the art world for three decades. But the facts cannot be denied: he is record-breakingly expensive at auction, an inspiration to Damien Hirst, the subject of important solo exhibitions in Europe and America and a particular hero in France, where he was made a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur in 2007.

All of which makes it something of a surprise that there has never been a show dedicated to his work at a British public gallery until now.

The Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park has announced details of an exhibition focusing on Koons’s Popeye series. It opens in July and is pitched partly as a cultural comment on the economic crisis because the spinach-guzzling cartoon character was conceived during the Depression.

Julia Peyton-Jones, the director of the gallery, said: “It does seem absolutely extraordinary that an artist of Jeff Koons’s distinction should not have had a show in a public space in the UK before.” Hans Ulrich Obrist, her co-director of exhibitions, said: “This show is incredibly urgent. But it would have been urgent 10 or 20 years ago. There have been Jeff Koons shows all over Europe and the United States but not in England.”

Like Andy Warhol before him and Hirst a decade later, Koons cultivated a distinctive public persona. Early on, he hired an an image consultant and placed adverts in glossy art magazines with photographs of him surrounded by the trappings of success.

In 1991 he unveiled Made in Heaven, a series of paintings and glass sculptures depicting him in explicit sexual poses with his then wife Ilona Staller. Ms Staller, better known as La Cicciolina, was a porn star who was elected to the Italian parliament in 1987. They split up in 1992, leading to a vicious custody battle over their son Ludwig.

Since then Koons has made a giant puppy out of flowers to stand guard outside the Guggenheim in Bilbao and, most recently, announced that he is working on the world’s most expensive artwork.

Train will be a working reproduction of a steam train (it will make its own steam and move its wheels), hanging from a 161ft (49 metre) sculpture of a crane. The estimated cost to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will be $25 million (£16.4 million).

None of these works will be at the Serpentine, which will concentrate on the Popeye series, begun in 2002. Familiar Koons formats will be represented, such as his cast reproductions of children’s inflatables and collages made with images from popular culture and snippets of bare female flesh.

The work explores his characteristic themes of consumerism, taste, art history, mundanity, childhood and sexuality and like most of his output, it will be almost all be made by his team of assistants rather than by him.

A former Wall Street banker from Pennsylvania, Koons made his name in the early 1980s when he presented vacuum cleaners in neon-lit glass cabinets and basketballs floating in salt water to an entranced Manhattan art world

The art factory

Jeff Koons set up in SoHo, New York, and hired more than 30 staff to make his increasingly kitsch output.

Early conceptual pieces included Rabbit, an inflatable bunny rendered in stainless steel.

His series, Banality, culminated in 1988 with Michael Jackson and Bubbles, a life-size, gold leaf-plated statue of the singer and his pet chimp. It sold for $5.6 million.

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