Jeff Koons has turned London’s Serpentine Gallery into a menagerie.

The 54-year-old artist shows inflatable lobsters, turtles and dolphins (made of polychromed aluminum) in his first exhibition at a U.K. public gallery, “Jeff Koons: Popeye Series” (which starts tomorrow and runs through Sept. 13).

Absent from this children’s kingdom is his 1988 white-and- gold ceramic sculpture “Michael Jackson and Bubbles,” which portrays the smiling superstar with an arm around his pet chimpanzee. Jackson died June 25 after suffering cardiac arrest at his home in the Los Angeles suburb of Bel Air.

“I wanted to show Michael as a contemporary Christ figure: I wanted to give the viewer a sense of a spiritual authority,” says the soft-spoken Koons, wearing a gray summer suit and a serious expression in an interview at the gallery.

Koons intended the sculpture as a way of “paying homage to the greatness,” he says. He had watched Jackson moonwalk, and “everybody’s jaw just dropped, seeing that.”

“The type of adulation, the type of support that’s given to pop artists -- this was the contemporary type of support that I thought that Christ would have received in his time,” explains Koons, who says he executed the sculpture in a Renaissance style, its triangular shape reminiscent of Michelangelo’s “Pieta.”

Koons became the world’s most expensive living artist in November 2007 when his sculpture “Hanging Heart (Magenta/Gold)” (1994-2006) fetched $23.6 million at auction in New York. He has been overtaken since by Lucian Freud.

Half Heart

Contemporary-art values have tumbled in the last year, with average auction prices down 76.2 percent since May 2008, according to London-based ArtTactic in a May report. Another version of Koons’s “Hanging Heart” was sold privately this year for $11 million, less than half the 2006 price.

Koons appears to take the slump in stride.

“I don’t think about it: I’m sure that on some level that’s probably true,” he says of his diminishing net worth. It all evens out in the end, he says, because “if everything’s going up, everything’s getting expensive, too.”

Less costly artworks, says the avid collector, mean “I’m buying.” He just purchased the early-17th-century painting “Adam and Eve” by the French rococo painter Francois Le Moyne.

The painting was sold for 1.3 million euros ($1.83 million) on June 24 at Sotheby’s in Paris, four times the top estimate, according to the auction house’s Web site.

Ultimately, art is “what moves me and enhances my belief in life,” says the artist. He feels ready to move on from the “Popeye Series,” which took several years to produce, as his works often do. Now, he is “much more involved in a dialogue that really spans a greater depth of human history.”

At that, he rushes off to pose for photographers before a steel dolphin.