Claes Oldenburg
Claes Oldenburg
Claes Oldenburgis an American sculptor, best known for his public art installations typically featuring very large replicas of everyday objects. Another theme in his work is soft sculpture versions of everyday objects. Many of his works were made in collaboration with his wife, Coosje van Bruggen. Van Bruggen died in 2009 after 32 years of marriage. Oldenburg lives and works in New York...
NationalitySwedish
ProfessionSculptor
Date of Birth28 January 1929
CityStockholm, Sweden
CountrySweden
I think of a monument as being symbolic and for the people and therefore rhetorical, not honest, not personal.
'Clothespin' was the first city monument on a large scale that could compete with the architecture around it.
My struggle has been to return painting to the tangible object, which is like returning the personality to touching and feeling the world around it, to offset the tendency to vagueness and abstraction. To remind people of practical activity, to suggest the sense and not to escape from the senses.
A life cycle can be imposed on an object. An object can be very energetic and active, and then it has a dying phase and a phase of decomposition.
If you really want to be an artist, you search yourself, and you find a lot of it comes from earlier times. I have pretty much built the work around my experiences. When I've moved from one place to another, the work has changed.
Because my work is naturally non-meaningful, the meaning found in it will remain doubtful and inconsistent - which is the way it should be. All that I care about is that, like any startling piece of nature, it should be capable of stimulating meaning.
I went back to the Art Institute, then spent the summer at the Ox-Bow School in Saugatuck, Michigan. That's what really awakened me. I made a lot of oil paintings and my first performance.
My rule was not to paint things as they were. I wasn't copying; I was remaking them as my own.
The main reason for the colossal objects is the obvious one, to expand and intensify the presence of the vessel - the object.
For a thorough use of ice cream cones, buy two; eat one and drop the other.
When you're working with an object, you can put in almost anything you want, you can make it abstract.
Painting, especially much better than words, allows oneself to express the various stages of thought, including the deeper levels, the underground stages of the mental process.
Chicago has a strange metaphysical elegance of death about it.
Of course, the '60s was a study in decadence. Everything just got worse and worse, and at the end of the '60s, everything was so horrible that people were killing each other.