Claes Oldenburg

Claes Oldenburg (Stockholm, Sweden, January 28, 1929-New York, July 18, 2022) was a Swedish-American sculptor, a pioneer of Pop Art. He is best known for his public art installations depicting large-scale replicas of everyday objects. Another theme in his work is soft sculpture versions of normally hard objects.

Biography

Oldenburg was born in Stockholm, Sweden, the son of a Swedish diplomat. As a child he moved with his family to the United States in 1939, first to New York and then to Chicago where he graduated from the Latin School of Chicago. He studied at Yale University from 1946 to 1950, then returned to Chicago where he studied under Paul Wieghardt at the Art Institute of Chicago until 1954.

While developing her art, she worked as a trainee journalist for the City News Bureau of Chicago. He opened his own shop and, in 1953, became a naturalized US citizen. He returned to New York in 1956. There he met a host of artists, including Jim Dine, Red Grooms, and Allan Kaprow, whose Happenings incorporated theatrical aspects and provided an alternative to the Abstract Expressionism that had come to dominate the art scene.

Oldenburg lives through the consolidation of the consumer society of the late 50s in the US and sees how people increasingly like to attract attention, which is why the time is characterized by opulence. The world was beginning to evolve very quickly, thanks, in part, to the media, which changed the foundations of human relationships. Oldenburg and other artists, based on this pretext, decided to use the innumerable diffusion possibilities to transmit messages through their works, because if their art is related to the social situation, it is easier to show and understand their compositions to the public.

In 1961 he opened his first store, called El taller, where he sold painted plaster figures, usually of considerable size or natural. They used to be gastronomic products: fruits and kitchen or household utensils. At first he only used soft and cheap materials.

After spending the first years of his artistic career on the Coger East Side, he settled on Broome Street, New York. His works have all the characteristics of Pop Art, since generally his creations are made with simple and easy-to-find objects. He wants his works to communicate the artist with the public.

In 1977, the artist married fellow artist Coosje Van Bruggen. Since then, they sign the works together, and Coosje advises and advises the artist in his creations. In 1978, they took up residence in Broome Street, where they created their own company, after having restored and fixed up two buildings on that street. There, they gathered the works created so far by the artist; They restored them and exhibited them in various places in the city. Even so, Oldenburg continues to maintain his artistic principles; he continues using simple materials, creating his works in an industrial way, which have to do with everyday goods, etc. His wife renamed some works from the 60s and 70s by Oldenburg.

In the United States, this art was born as an artistic reaction against Abstract Expressionism, since it was considered empty and elitist, it also brought with it the return of irony and parody to compensate for the personal symbolism found in abstract expressionism; in the mid-50s he was born in the United Kingdom, in this case the origin of this art was the paradoxical imagination of American popular culture. However, Pop Art is also known as the continuation of some aspects of abstract expressionism, such as the belief in the possibilities of making art in works of great proportions. Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp are some of the artists considered to be the forerunners of the pop movement.

The sources of pop are inspired by the daily reality of the moment, by the mass culture that is born from the reproduction industry. These artists tried to find simple and recognizable images and elevate them to the category of art.

Mass production and consumerism provided the icons that will be used in the work of the so-called “pop artists”. The guidelines of a mechanized style and of series reproduced by the contemporary spectator are marked by daily experience. This is art with a strong visual charge, an artistic production that is directly linked to the world of advertising. The size of the works is more and more spectacular, the motifs come to the fore or are also multiplied along the entire surface; expressiveness is relegated to a second term, maintaining an impersonal style that portrays his contemporaneity.

The theme was mainly reduced to commercial consumer items such as: soup cans (Warhol), flowers, revolvers, etc. The artist draws in his works, with banal themes and careless execution, a universe close to the ordinary citizen.

You could endlessly repeat and reproduce anything, articles and portraits of high society characters. The reproduction of the work of art is one of the bases of this style. The portrait, as it happened in previous times, takes on great strength. All the relevant people wished they could have their own pop vision. They had the opportunity to put themselves in front of Andy Warhol: Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy, Grace Kelly... so that they would record his passage through modernity.

Most of the works are difficult to understand. The concept of Pop Art emphasizes above all the attitudes that lead to it. On the other hand, pop art and comics or comics are related. There are many authors who base their Pop Art works on comics. Some of them are Roy Lichtenstein with “Good Morning, Darling”. Over the years the opposite would also occur, Pop Art will influence many comic book writers.

Regarding Spain, this art was mainly related to the so-called “new figurativism”. The Crónica Team, made up of Rafael Solbes and Manolo Valdés, among others, worked closely with this approach. Finally, Japan is the place where this art is unique, many of the Pop artists used anime as inspiration, as well as other Japanese art style. Takashi Murakami is the best-known artist and his works are dedicated to young audiences. The best-known work of Pop Art is: "Campbell's Soup Cans" by Andy Warhol.

Individual work

In 1962 he had a great change when it came to reconstructing his objects and he began to make works with unstable shapes filled with tow and at the same time he made his giant works. These works modified the form that we have understood.

In 1974 he created The Home in which he began a version of ordinary objects that were colossally configured. In 1976 he built a 45 foot tall sculpture in downtown Philadelphia.

Some of his most important works are:

• The geometric mousecreated at 5 scales. This geometric mouse was first used as a mask in an interpretation and then proposed as a facade for the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art. In the printing of Oldenburg 1968 Notes the mouse appears as a hill sculpture, like a city park (the eyes serving as swimming pools) and as a floating sculpture. If the mouse is placed on top of Hollywood, it could suffer the same luck, in time, like the famous giant letters and fall on its face.

Stage with Coosje van Bruggen

Since 1976, Claes Oldenburg has collaborated with Coosje Van Brunggen on large-scale projects applied to urban engineering that are a true display of ingenuity and irony. Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen first worked together on the reconstruction and relocation of the tall 41 foot Trowel (1971-76; originally located in Sonsbeek Park in Arnhem, The Netherlands) currently located at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo (Gelderland)., Netherlands). Oldenburg and van Bruggen married in 1977 and have continued their artistic collaboration for more than 25 years. Both American citizens, Oldenburg and van Bruggen's work reflects a creative sensibility that is influenced by their countries of origin, their educational and professional histories, and their personalities.

In May 2002, Oldenburg and van Bruggen installed four large-scale sculptures in the penthouse garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, titled Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen on the Roof.. Later that summer, after announcing that they had acquired "the largest collection of Oldenburg drawings in the world," the Whitney Museum of American Art presented two consecutive collections of works by the artists. Claes Oldenburg Drawings (1959-1977) was the largest exhibition since 1977 devoted to Oldenburg's early works with Coosje van Bruggen's exhibition Drawings (1992-1998) presenting several large-scale collaborative works.

The artistic team has executed more than 40 permanently situated sculptures on architectural scale throughout the United States, Europe and Japan, including Spoonbridge and Cherry- Spoon and Cherry (1988), Minneapolis Mixed (Matchcover- Matches) (1992), Barcelona; Flyers (1994), Kansas City; Saw- Serrucho (1996), Tokyo; Needle, Thread and Knot (2000), Milan; and more recently, the 40 meter high cone (2001) atop the Neumarkt Gallery in Cologne, Germany. Their collaboration has also spanned small parks and garden sculptures as well as indoor installations.

The work of Oldenburg and van Bruggen can be found in numerous public collections, including: the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, USA), the Chinati Foundation (Marfa, Texas, USA), the Dallas Museum of Art (Texas, USA), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, USA), the Israel Museum (Jerusalem, Israel), the Valencian Institute of Modern Art (Valencia, Spain), the Basel Art Museum (Switzerland), the Museum of Contemporary Art of Los Angeles (California, USA), the Modern Museum (Stockholm, Sweden), the Pompidou Center (Paris, France), the MoMA (New York, USA), the National Gallery of Art (Washington, USA), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (California, USA), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, USA), the Urban Museum (Amsterdam, the Netherlands), the Tate Gallery (London, UK), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, USA) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, USA).

Oldenburg and van Bruggen currently live and work in midtown Manhattan, California and on a centuries-old estate in the Loire Valley, France, whose natural and cultural surroundings have fostered inspiration for artists.

Works

In the first phase of the artist he leaned towards the use of soft and cheap materials with which he made an imitation of everyday objects. By using this type of material, he denied one of the premises of conventional sculpture, which tends to use hard materials. Also with the use of these materials, its initial shape is modified just by the viewer exerting a little pressure, this fact makes it clear that the author wants the viewer to touch his work so that it can be given different shapes. He soon began using plaster for his works.

The first thing that impresses you about the sculpture of this particular artist is the dimensions of the sculptures he has made, in addition to how big they can be, many of them have interactive capabilities. One of his first interactive sculptures was a squishy lipstick sculpture called Lipstick (Ascending) on Catepillar Tracks that would deflate unless someone pumped air into it. This sculpture was redesigned into a more solid aluminum form, standing upright on top of the wheels of a tank. Lipstick is currently in the courtyard of Morse College, at Yale University, in Connecticut. This sculpture was commissioned by Stuart Wrede and students from the Yale School of Architecture.

Between the years 1960-1965 he did some happenings, one of the most notable he did was Autobodys (Los Angeles, 1964), which included cars, crowds of people and ice cubes, in which the attendees were involved and they became participants. Also in 1961 he opened a store in New York dedicated to selling reproductions of hamburgers, cakes, etc. Another large work was Clothespin, which was commissioned in May 1974 by Jack Wolgin, this figure is located in Philadelphia and is almost 14 meters high. This with another example such as Seesaw-Tool (1984), a gardener's tool more than 5 meters high, which is painted with bright and cheerful colors. With these examples among others you can see the author's taste for creating replicas of everyday objects that we use in our daily lives. Other works by this author are Máquina de escribir softa, Geometric mouse, Cuchara-puente and cherry, among others.

In addition to independent projects, he occasionally contributes to architectural projects, particularly for the Chiat/Day advertising agency's headquarters in the Venice district of Los Angeles, California. The main entrance is made up of a pair of giant binoculars.

In 1989 he received the Wolf Foundation Award for the Arts in Jerusalem and in 1995 he was awarded the Schock Prize, awarded by a committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Visual Arts.