Claes Oldenburg

Claes Oldenburg was born on January 28, 1929 in Stockholm, Sweden to a Swedish diplomat who was based in New York and he attended the Latin School of Chicago and afterwards went to Yale University where from 1946 to 1950, he studied literature and art history. He then returned to Chicago where he took classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago later, after moving to New York, he met and was influenced by such artists as Jim Dine, Red Grooms, and Allan Kaprow. Starting 1969 to 1977, Oldenburg was in a relationship with the artist and sculptor, Hannah Wilke with whom he shared several studios and travelled together with and in 1977, he married Coosje Van Bruggen. Oldenburg’s first show was at the Judson Gallery of New York in 1959 and it included metaphorical drawings and papier - mache sculptures and in 1966, he was credited with an exhibition of his work at the Moderna Museet; in 1969 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among several others. Oldenburg won the Wolf Prize in Arts in 1989, in 2000, he was awarded the National medal of Arts and he has also received honorary degrees from several universities in the United States and in Europe. His sculpture, named the Typewriter sculpted in 1976, and was one among an edition of three was sold was sold for $2.2 million at Christie’s New York in 2009. Oldenburg’s creativity can be traced to his childhood when he was often left to entertain himself with his father’s office machinery. He has always been fascinated by scale, and during the 1960s, he began enlarging everyday items, often imagining them the size of public monuments.

Oldenburg’s art reflects the popular culture of the 1960s when he and his associates began to use images associated with popular culture in their work.  In the early 1960s, Oldenburg helped to usher in the Pop Art revolution by using materials like burlap and canvas to create sandwiches and ice cream cones the size of furniture and everywhere he traveled, he replaced existing monuments with those of his own design. His non-heroic subjects challenged traditional concepts of public sculpture and the artist has envisioned a huge pair of scissors on the site of the Washington Monument, a giant fan to replace the Statue of Liberty, and two enormous toilet-tank floats installed on a river in the city of London. His work has concentrated more on environmental awareness and conservation. Oldenburg's installation The Street, exhibited twice in Greenwich Village in 1960, used banal, trash like materials to depict pedestrians, cars, street signs, and other elements of a New York City streetscape and as it turns out, the food sculptures are autobiographical. "The key to my work is that it's about my experience," said Mr. Oldenburg, 83, in an interview in Vienna some years ago, "If I ate BLTs, which I did, I would sooner or later want to create them".