Facts about Claes Oldenburg
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Swedish-born Claes Oldenburg became a naturalized American citizen and studied at Yale University and the Art Institute of Chicago before emerging as a key pop art figure.
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Oldenburg's 1969 proposal for a 9,000-foot-tall Lipstick in Times Square would have reached higher than the Empire State Building but was rejected as too audacious for Manhattan's skyline.
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Oldenburg's 1992 Shuttlehcock monuments—four 48-foot-tall badminton shuttlecocks installed in four different cities—transformed a children's game into monumental public sculptures across Kansas City, St. Louis, Denver, and Indianapolis.
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Oldenburg's 1970 Giant Typewriter Eraser sculpture in Los Angeles stands 16 feet tall and features a functioning rubber eraser tip that can actually erase chalk marks on pavement.
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Oldenburg's 1978 Proposed Colossal Monument for Toronto featured a 620-foot-tall baseball bat that would have dwarfed the CN Tower, though it was never constructed.
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Oldenburg's 1965 Soft Pay-Telephone sculpture transformed a rigid public communication device into a drooping vinyl form, challenging functional design through absurdist transformation.
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Oldenburg's 1962 exhibition The Store in New York's Lower East Side featured over 100 soft fabric sculptures of mundane consumer objects priced between one and five dollars each.
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Oldenburg's 1971 proposal for a 1,200-foot-tall Stake monument in Times Square would have pierced the Manhattan skyline but remained unrealized due to cost and feasibility concerns.
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During the 1970s and 1980s, Oldenburg collaborated with architect Coosje van Bruggen to design monumental public sculptures including a 42-foot-tall baseball bat in Chicago completed in 1977.
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Starting in 1955, Claes Oldenburg's Store on the Lower East Side sold hand-sewn fabric sculptures of everyday objects like pastries and clothing at affordable prices to challenge fine art conventions.
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The Guggenheim Museum in New York displayed Oldenburg's soft sculptures made from vinyl and canvas throughout the 1960s, establishing him as a leading figure in the pop art movement.
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A giant clothespin measuring 45 feet tall was designed by Claes Oldenburg and installed outside Philadelphia's Centre Square in 1976, weighing approximately 45 tons.
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Oldenburg's 1969 performance piece Autobodys involved performers moving inside a giant fiberglass car body for extended periods as participatory art.
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Colossal Clothespin, Oldenburg's 45-foot-tall steel sculpture installed in Philadelphia in 1976, stands as one of the world's largest public artworks weighing 45 tons.
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In 1976, Claes Oldenburg created a 45-foot-tall lipstick monument in front of Yale University's Morse College that became an iconic pop art sculpture.