While performance has been a major component of his work Claes Oldenburg is best known for his monumental public art installations and light-hearted 'soft sculptures' that mimic everyday objects and food items in fabric forms.
Read MoreMoving to New York in 1956, Oldenburg developed a fascination with the everyday objects and imagery of his urban surroundings: storefront windows, trash, graffiti, and advertising. Before Andy Warhol was making his iconic screen-prints, Oldenburg recognised the sculptural possibilities of quotidian objects.
Claes Oldenburg's The Store (1961) responded to American consumer culture by transforming the artist's studio into a parody of neighbourhood shops, complete with plaster versions of familiar consumer objects.
In the early 1960s, Oldenburg staged a number of happenings, an early form of performance art heralded by Pop Artists and Conceptualists that were typically loosely structured, held in a gallery or installation environment, and involved spectator participation.
Oldenburg's performances often featured enlarged versions of everyday objects made from cloth and paper as props, seeding a strong theatrical element in Claes Oldenburg's art that spans much of his career.
In 1985, he staged Corso del Coltello: Knife Ship I (1985), which involved a giant replica of a Swiss army knife with oars set afloat in Venice's Arsenal.
Oldenburg's happenings also gave birth to his first 'soft sculptures', evolving from the props sewn by first wife, the artist and poet Patty Mucha. Early examples include Floor Burger, Floor Cone, and Floor Cake (all 1962), which featured in a 1962 rendition of The Store. Rendered from foam-rubber and covered in canvas and vinyl, these large sculptures of popular food items are emblematic of Oldenburg's early sculptural practice.
Oldenburg's sculptural oeuvre in the latter half of his career was defined by monument-sized public sculpture. These large-scale works began as fantasy proposals in a series of drawings and watercolours, including 'Proposed Colossal Monuments' (1965–1969). Ranging from a huge vacuum cleaner for the Battery in New York to a colossal windshield wiper for Chicago's Grant Park, the proposed projects imagined everyday items upscaled for public spaces.
In 1969, the first of Oldenburg's monumental projects was realised in the form of Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, commissioned by students at Yale University as a protest against the Vietnam War. This was followed on a much larger scale by Oldenburg's Clothespin (1976), a 45-foot high clothes-peg installed in downtown Philadelphia.
Following their marriage in 1977, Claes Oldenburg and his wife, Coosje van Bruggen collaborated on a number of large-scale commissions until her passing in 2009. Oldenburg and van Bruggen worked together on large installations, including Spoonbridge and Cherry (1985–88) for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden; Soft Shuttlecock, which was installed at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York for a 1995 retrospective of Oldenburg's works; and Claes Oldenburg's ice cream homage, Dropped Cone (2001), planted atop a shopping centre in Cologne. The last collaboration of this matrimonial partnership to be realised is Dropped Bouquet (2021), shown for for the first time at Pace Gallery, New York in 2021.
