Hamburgers, an ice cream horn or an electrical outlet: these gigantic sculptures made Claes Oldenburg an artist appreciated by critics and the public. His works have often been seen by millions of people in public places where they were exhibited.
Le Monde with AFP
He was known for his monumental sculptures of everyday objects: the American pop art artist of Swedish origin Claes Oldenburg died Monday July 18 at the age of 93 in New York, announced one of the art galleries that represented it.
“He recovered from a fall and died at his home and in his studio in New York,” said Pace Gallery in a message transmitted to the France-Presse agency.
His founder, Arne Glimcher, praised “one of the most radical artists of the 20th century”, who “changed the very nature of sculpture” and whose “influence is still perceptible today”. He liked to represent everyday life and the objects that punctuate him. Hamburgers, an ice cream horn or clothespin: these gigantic size sculptures made Claes Oldenburg a famous artist worldwide. Millions of people have already been able to attend his works in public places.
“with his longtime wife and collaborator, Coosje Van Bruggen (died in 2009), Oldenburg carried out more than 40 large -scale public projects Around the world, “write the Galeries Pace.
a figure of opposition to the war
Among his works, “the lipstick mounted on a tank”, exhibited on the campus of the University of Yale, in the late 1960s, had caused a sensation and had become a symbol for opponents of war American in Vietnam. Labor pliers, always visible in Philadelphia, where we can read the “76” figures, had also marked the bicentenary of the declaration of American independence, in 1976.
Born in 1929 in Stockholm, Claes Oldenburg grows in particular in Chicago, where his diplomat father is consul general of Sweden. He studied at the University of Yale, then at the “School of the Art Institute of Chicago”, and moved to New York in the 1950s. “Oldenburg became known in New York at the end of the 1950s And in the early 1960s, when he staged his happenings – a series of delusional facilities and performances inspired by his environment “, in the Lower East Side district, in Manhattan, tell the Galeries Pace in their homage .
“I am for An art that mingles with daily shit and which emerges from it anyway winner. I am for an art that imitates the human, who is comical, if necessary, or violent, or all that is necessary, “he had written in his manifesto, in 1961. Claes Oldenburg was notably the subject of Exhibitions at MoMA, Whitney Museum in New York, or at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.