She is pop music's favourite oddball, famous as much for her avant-garde outfits as her convention smashing musical stylings. But now, Björk, Iceland's biggest export, is to be the subject of a full scale retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Focusing on the multifaceted work of Björk, as composer, musician and artist, the exhibition, which opens in 2015, will chronicle her "daring and adventurous projects" over the past 20 years, as well as trace her seven studio albums, from Debut released in 1993, to Biophilia in 2011.
Klaus Biesenbach, chief-curator-at-large for MoMA, organised the exhibition. He said: "Björk is an extraordinarily innovative artist whose contributions to contemporary music, video, film, fashion and art have had a major impact on her generation worldwide. This highly experimental exhibition offers visitors a direct experience of her hugely collaborative body of work."
The retrospective will chronicle Björk's life, performances, costumes and instruments, and her work in music, art and film. The show will have an installation, devised by her, which will present a retrospective with a biographical and imaginatively fictitious narrative.
It will also showcase her work with video directors, photographers and fashion designers. It includes, too, her collaboration with Sir David Attenborough, who contributed narration to the album Biophilia, reading lines such as "we are on the brink of a revolution that will reunite humans with nature through new technological innovations".
The MoMA retrospective will culminate in a "newly commissioned, immersive music and film experience", which was created and realised by the director Andrew Huang and 3D designers Autodesk.
Björk, now 48, started out in the 1980s as the lead singer in the band The Sugarcubes, before pursuing a solo career and releasing her solo album Debut in 1993, an album that has since sold 4.7m copies.
Along the way she won acclaim as an actor, taking the Best Actress award at Cannes, in 2000, for her role in Lars Von Trier's film Dancer in the Dark.
The retrospective announcement comes days after MoMA confirmed it had included Biophilia, Björk's 2011 album, in its permanent collection.
The album, described by Björk as her attempt to "define humanity's relationship with sound and the universe", was released in a pioneering album app format, and will be the first app to enter the museum's collection.
The show, entitled Björk, will be running from 7 March to 7 June 2015.
