Pop artist Claes Oldenburg is dead. He died in New York on Monday at the age of 93, said a spokeswoman for the Pace gallery, which has represented the artist since 1960. Oldenburg recently recovered from a fall in his studio in the SoHo district, where he also lived. Oldenburg gained notoriety by elevating the Pop Art of the 1960s, which until then had primarily been printed and painted, to sculpture and humorously placing consumer objects in a new context. Along with Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, he was one of the most important representatives of this movement.
Claes Thure Oldenburg was born in Stockholm in 1929. A few years later the family moved to the United States. From the 1950s he experimented in exhibitions with papier-mâché and plaster. At his gallery on the Lower East Side, he sold plaster casts of such mundane things as shoes, shirts, and cake slices. Today, these works are considered the first sculptures of Pop Art. With growing popularity, Oldenburg’s sculptures also increased in size. A lipstick on a tracked vehicle on the Yale campus and the massive clothespin “Clothespin” in Philadelphia (both 1976) were early outdoor works. One of his best-known works is the “Spoonbridge and Cherry” developed with his second wife Coosje van Bruggen, a spoon for giants with a cherry, which is one of the symbols of the city of Minneapolis.
Source: Nachrichten
