Swedish-born American pop artist Claes Oldenburg, known for his monumental sculptures of everyday objects, died on Monday at his home and studio in the SoHo district of Manhattan. He was 93 years old.
His death was confirmed by Adriana Erga Resta, a spokeswoman for the Pace Gallery in New York. Adriana Erga Resta has long represented him, along with the Paula Cooper Gallery.
Mr. Oldenberg entered the New York art scene in earnest in the late 1950s, accepting the audience-participating “happenings” that were popular at the time, road signs, wires and stucco clothes, and even pieces of pie. His approach to everyday objects, performance and collaboration has influenced artists for generations.
An early project, The Store (1961), opened in the East Village storefront and sold ridiculous plaster replicas of everyday things such as cartoon shoes and cheeseburgers. Of abstract expressionism.
As he became more and more focused on sculpture, he began to scale his work, starting with ordinary objects such as hamburgers, ice cream cones, and appliances, to unfamiliar and often impressive dimensions.
One of his most famous installations, built in 1976, the 200th year of the Declaration of Independence, is a 45-foot-high, 10-ton-high black steel sculpture with metal springs, as the title suggests. It is a prepared “clothespin”. This work is in stark contrast to the traditional public sculptures that Mr. Oldenberg, who pretended to be a city official, was supposed to include “Bulls, Greeks, and Lots of Necked Broads.”
Oldenberg was strongly influenced by the French artist Jean Dubuffet, who brought so-called outsider art to galleries and museums and disrupted the status quo of institutional art. But like many pop artists, Oldenburg also got clues from Rrose Sélavy. Marcel Duchamp was a so-called off-the-shelf sculpture of the early 20th century, which was actually an ordinary mass-produced object (bicycle wheel, urinal). However, Mr. Oldenberg’s sculptures were handmade rather than purchased in stores, and as he said, he wanted to be “as mysterious as nature.”
“My intention is to create everyday objects that escape the definition,” he once said. He rarely painted people. Instead, he focused on items that are closely related to human needs and desires. “I have consistently expressed myself in objects with objects, not through humans, but with reference to humans,” he said. “His work was mostly psychoanalytic,” as Arne Glimcher, an art dealer who had known and worked with Mr. Oldenberg since the early 1960s, said in an interview on Monday.
Grimcher said accurate drawings were the basis of Oldenberg’s work. “He was a draftsman comparable to Angle and Picasso,” he said, but “boldly ruined it.”
His most important contribution to the sculpture was to change from hard to soft, such as bronze and wood, Grimcher said. The sculptures will deflate, and Mr. Grimcher recalled that Mr. Oldenburg had instructed his companions to “make them fluffy.”
Paula Cooper, a New York art dealer who has co-represented Oldenburg for many years, describes his everyday sculpture as follows: He adopted a simple idea and extended it. “
Claes Toure Oldenburg was born on January 28, 1929 in Stockholm, the son of Gosuta and Sigrid Elizabeth (Lindforce) Oldenburg. His father, a diplomat, was stationed in London, Berlin, Oslo and New York before being appointed Consul General of Sweden in Chicago in 1936, where Cress grew up and attended the Latin School of Chicago.
Oldenburg studied literature and art history at Yale University from 1946 to 1950. He returned to the Midwest and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago with a painter in the early 1950s. Paul WeegartStudent Paul Klee At the modernist Bauhaus school in Weimar, Germany. Oldenburg worked for the City News Bureau of Chicago in the early days of art school. There, one of his duties included drawing cartoons. He was the only major artist associated with pop art in professional comics.
Oldenberg became a US citizen in 1953 and moved to New York in 1956. His first exhibition at the Judson Gallery in May 1959 included drawings, collages and objects made of paper machetes.
His first important show in New York was the street (1960), which consisted of people made of cars, road signs, paperboard and weave, and the store (1961), which opened a studio and occupied the storefront. .. Lower East Side, for visitors, brings art and commerce into an artist’s atelier. The objects sold included sandwiches, pies, sausages, and clothing made of wire and plaster, painted in an overflowing dripping style reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism. His work expanded rapidly.
In 1960, Oldenburg became the first co-producer to marry Patty Mucha, the artist who starred in his films. He created drawings of objects made of canvas and later foam-filled vinyl, like his famous “soft” sculptures, and Mucha sewed them most of the time. Both “Floor Cake” and “Floor Burger” are from 1962 and led to the entire “Giant Toothpaste Tube” and “Bathroom” installed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1969.
He also participated in happenings by Jim Dine, Robert Whitman, Simone Forti and other artists.
Oldenberg had an even bigger idea, but sketched monumental suggestions such as “Fan instead of the Statue of Liberty” and “Designing a nose-shaped tunnel entrance.””Scissors in Motion” to replace the Washington Monument
His first realized “giant monument”, which he called this kind of work, was the “caterpillar truck lipstick”. Here, a giant lipstick tube made of vinyl and attached to the wheels of a tractor, with obvious penis and military tone, at the moment the Vietnam War protests and student activism shook universities across the country in 1969. I was rolled to the Yale campus.
Vincent Scully, an ale architect and “lipstick” champion, later described the scene as “quite like Petrograd in 1917.” The “Lipstick” was made of steel in 1974 and was installed at Yale University in the courtyard of Morse College in a residential building.
In the early days of New York, Oldenburg was Allan Kaprow, George Segal, Robert Whitman, And participated in the happening to make the performance art bloom. He changed the name of the studio to Reagan Theater in 1962 and performed there over the weekend. In 1965 he rented a health club pool for an event titled “Wash”. This involved colored balloons and people floating in the pool. Twenty years later, Oldenburg was still combining art and theater. In 1985, in collaboration with Dutch writer and curator Coosje van Bruggen and architect Frank Gehry, he Performed an elaborate land and water scene In Venice, entitled “Knife Course”, the centerpiece is a ship shaped like a Swiss Army knife.
Oldenburg met Van Burggen after divorcing Mucha in 1970. Van Burggen was a staff member of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam at the time. Oldenburg’s first collaboration with her was the final version of “Trowel I,” an oversized garden tool set up on the grounds of the Kroller-Muller Museum in Otterlo, the Netherlands, in 1976.
The couple got married in 1977. He has collaborated on more than 40 projects, including “Spoon Bridge and Cherry” at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden from 1985 to 1988 and “Giant Binoculars” (1991) incorporated into Gary’s design. Chiat-Day Building in Venice, California.
Oldenburg is survived by two stepchildren, Paulus Kapteyn and Maartje Oldenburg, and three grandchildren. Van Burggen has passed away His brother, Richard E. Oldenberg, was the director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 1972 to 1994 and died in 2018 at the age of 84.
In addition to requesting sculpture, Oldenburg was the subject of many solo exhibitions, including the Museum of Modern Art in 1969. In 1995, the National Museum of Art in Washington and the Guggenheim Museum in New York jointly held a retrospective exhibition. “Claes Oldenburg: Anthology.” His work with Ms. van Bruggen is included in the collections of the most major contemporary art museums in the United States and Europe.
Oldenburg’s work is most often associated with pop art in the 1960s, but he saw his monumental version of the humble object as more than just a mediocre celebration. ..
“Catalogs can be created with all such objects,” he said. “It will read like a list of gods and things that project our modern mythical thoughts. We invest religious feelings in our things. Objects in Sunday newspaper ads. See how beautifully it is drawn. “
Grimcher went further in the interview and saw Oldenberg as an observer of American culture, meaning something that certain objects, such as humble phones, burgers, and ice cream cones, gained traction. “They were prophetic,” he said of Mr Oldenburg’s sculpture. “They were sociological statements.”
Danielle Cruz contributed to the report.
