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Claes oldenburg Biography

Claes Oldenburg

(Stockholm, 1929) American artist.Along with Andy Warhol, he is considered one of the most prominent figures in pop art , a trend inspired by mass culture that reached its peak in the 1960s.At the age of five he moved with his family to Chicago.In 1950 he graduated from Yale and went on to study at the Chicago Institute School of Art.In 1956 he moved to New York, where he soon met other happening and environment artists (Jim Dine, Red Grooms, Allan Kaprow and Geoge Segal, among others).

Claes Oldenburg

In connection with these experiences he presented his first solo exhibition at the Judson Gallery (1960) under the title of The street .In it he gathered figures and objects made with cheap materials (cloth, cardboard, paper), forming a unique evocation of the urban landscape.

A year later he exhibited The Store , a space crammed with facsimiles of food, clothing and other objects, made mainly of wire, plaster and fabric, and painted in bright colors.The intention of creating a mimetic realism was evident, but these products were more like their advertising images than themselves and the greatest novelty of the exhibition was the fact that it forced the viewer to literally get inside the work to be able to contemplate it.

From 1962 on, he introduced a substantial change in the way of reconstructing everyday objects and used for this purpose canvases filled with bast, so that their shapes were not stable, while at the same time increasing their sizes.The reconstruction of industrial objects with soft materials and on a scale that oversizes them perverts their material and functional nature and irreversibly modifies our awareness of them.

Bridge-spoon and strawberry (1988)

Gigantic and soft Swedish light switch (1962, Ludwig Museum, Cologne); Hamburger, polo shirt and price (1962, Carpenter Collection, New Canaam), Typewriter (1963-1964, Sonnabend Gallery, Paris), and Soft toilet (1966, Whitney Museum, New York), are good examples of this.The change from hard to soft is also an incitement to the touch, a way of endowing the sculpture with warmth, of wanting to make it closer to the observer, because with a soft object, says Oldenburg, a dialogue can be established, while rigidity builds a wall of indifference.

Later would come the monumentalization of everyday objects such as the Broken Button (1981, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia) or the great Pickaxe nailed in a garden in Kassel (1982).Starting in 1976, he collaborated with Coosje Van Brunggen on large-scale projects applied to urban engineering that constitute a true display of wit and irony.Only Oldenburg could design a bridge in the shapes of a bent screw or a spoon that supports an immense cherry of the most extraordinary of reds.

With these sculptures he wants to cause a displacement of the perception that we usually have of the objects that surround us.Because of his interest in the paradox, Oldenburg is closer to the original Dada or Surrealism than the rest of the pop artists.

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