By Natalie White

Throughout his career, Jeff Koons has pioneered new approaches to the ready-made, tested the boundaries between advanced art and mass culture, challenged the limits of industrial fabrication, and transformed the relationship of artists to the cult of celebrity and the global market.

To date, he is widely regarded as one of the most important, influential, popular, and controversial artists of the postwar era.

Yet despite these achievements, Koons has never been the subject of a retrospective surveying the full scope of his career.

Jeff Koons: A Retrospective is thus the artist’s first major museum presentation in New York, and the first to fill nearly the entirety of the Whitney’s Marcel Breuer building with a single artist’s work. It will also be the final exhibition to take place there before the Museum opens its new building in the Meatpacking District in 2015.

Comprising almost 150 objects dating from 1978 to the present, this exhibition will be the most comprehensive ever devoted to the artist’s groundbreaking oeuvre.

By reconstituting all of his most iconic works and significant series in a chronological narrative, the retrospective allows visitors to understand Koons' remarkably diverse output as a multifaceted whole.

Jeff Koons' "Michael Jackson and Bubbles," the larger-than-life gilded porcelain sculpture of the late artist and his cherished pet chimpanzee, features in the exhibit.

The exhibition then travels to the Centre Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris (26 November 2014 – 27 April 2015) and to the Guggenheim Bilbao (5 June 5 – 27 September 2015).