Claes Oldenburg

Pop giant Claes Oldenburg created large-scale conceptual sculpures featuring blown-up replicas of every objects. Oldenburg was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1929. His father was then a Swedish diplomat in New York, and in 1936 he was appointed consul general of Sweden to Chicago where the Swedish American artist Claes Oldenburg grew up. He later studied literature and art history at Yale University before continuing his artistic education at the Art Institute of Chicago.

In 1956 Oldenburg moved to New York and worked in the library of the Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration. There, he had the opportunity to soak up knowledge on the history of art. A year later, the artist began the conception of his iconic ‘soft sculptures’ and completed a free-hanging piece made from women’s stocking stuffed with newspaper — now widely referred to as Sausage.

Claes Oldenburg’s art is renowned for its transformation of everyday objects, like food, French horns, typewriters and trowels, into large-scale public sculptures, imbuing the mundane with a sense of grandeur and humour. His early works were influenced by the vibrant street life of New York and the burgeoning Pop movement, exploring the rising consumer culture and mass production phenomenon.

In 1969 Oldenburg designed one of his most famous works, Clothespin. It was a moment when the artist was moving away from soft sculptures and toward large-scale projects. His punchy graphic sketch, which envisioned the clothespin as a soaring structure that would pierce the skies, was presented as a ‘late submission’ to the historic 1922 Chicago Tribune Architectural Competition. Oldenburg created these works at heights of four and ten feet before going on to construct a large-scale project version that was 45 feet tall. Erected in 1976 in Philadelphia’s Centre Square Plaza across from City Hall, the gigantic Clothespin was Oldenburg’s first large-scale civic sculpture to be permanently placed. In 2015 a ten-foot edition of Clothespin sold at Christie’s in New York for US$3,637,000.

In 1976 Oldenburg began his artistic collaboration Dutch American writer and art historian Coosje van Bruggen, who became Oldenburg’s wife in 1977. The pair worked on numerous public commissions and architectural projects, including Spoonbridge and Cherry (1988) for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Typewriter Eraser, Scale X (1999) in the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., Giant Binoculars (1991), a building-mounted sculpture created in collaboration with architect Frank Gehry, in Venice Beach, Los Angeles, and many more.

Christie’s sold an edition of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s Typewriter Eraser, Scale X (1998–99) in 2022 for US$8,405,000 — a world auction record for the duo. This work was acquired by the late Microsoft co-found Paul G. Allen in 1999.

Claes Oldenburg’s art transcends traditional boundaries, transforming the mundane into the monumental. His works can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and more.