CLAES OLDENBURG
Estocolmo, (Sweden)1929- New York, (USA) 2022

After studying at Yale University, in 1925 he enrolled at the Art Institute in Chicago. In 1953 he obtained American nationality. He moved to New York in 1956 and he presented works made in wood and newspaper in his first solo exhibition at the Judson Gallery in 1959. A year later, at the same gallery, he showed The Street, an installation made with urban waste, and the setting for his first happening, Snapshots from the City. His work with poor materials such as plaster and his preference for objects of everyday use led him to develop the first items of The Store, which he presented in 1961 in the group exhibition Environments, Situations, Spaces at the Martha Jackson Gallery. The following year he made his first “soft sculptures” out of cloth and showed them at the Green Gallery and in group exhibitions such as New Realists at the Sidney Janis Gallery and Popular Image (Washington Gallery of Modern Art, 1963). In 1964 he took part in the Biennale di Venezia, where he presented his new series, The Home, which he exhibited at the Galerie Ileana Sonnabend in Paris, together with further objects for The Store.
The greater formal complexity of his soft sculptures in the latter part of the sixties was accompanied by work with multiples (introducing the concept of standardised output), colour lithography and metal sculpture (Lipstick with Stroke Attached, 1967). At the same time, his exploration of the theme of scale, on which he worked in pieces such as Profiles Airflow (1966) and Geometric Mouse (1969), led to his giant soft sculptures and monuments –Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, 1969- which opened up a field of work that intensified during the following decades. In 1976, Center Square Plaza in Philadelphia became the home of Clothespin, the first of his nearly thirty monuments set in an urban environment. In 1980 he presented a 1:1 scale model of Crusoe Umbrella at Leo Castelli, after which he received a variety of commissions to make monumental sculptures for interior spaces. In 1984, together with Cosje van Bruggen and Frank O. Gehry, he designed a great happening –Il Corso del Coltello (The Course of the Knife)- for the city of Venice. This led to further collaborations with the architect and projects for the architectural development of some of his sculptural proposals. Since the late sixties his work has been seen in various retrospectives: MoMA (1969), Pasadena Art Museum (1971), Stedelijk Museum (1977), and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1995). He died in New York in 2022.