His immense sculptures of everyday objects have invited themselves to public spaces around the world. The American artist of Swedish origin was 93 years old.
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He shared his time between Manhattan and a small village in Sarthe, but his works are everywhere. In Paris, a semi -buried giant bike in a lawn of the Villette park, of which only a few elements emerge, and in particular a fragment of wheel which is the joy of gallops, which uses it as a slide. In Cassel (Germany), a drawn intended for people of very, very, very large size. In the garden of the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City (United States), disproportionate badminton steering wheel which has become the logo of the place. In Tokyo, an egoin saw that attacks a lawn on the roadside and threatens to attack the bridge that overlooks it. An ice cream horn (12 meters high) crushed on the hawk of a Cologne building, or even a soft rubber w.-c. on the seat of which no one in a hurry, would dare not Sit.
At the Venice Biennial finally, in September 1985, a strange galley in the shape of a Swiss knife, created with his wife Coosje Van Bruggen (1942-2009) and the complicity of many friends, including the architect Frank Gehry, who For three days played the Bucentaure for a performance entitled Il Corso del Coltello. Daily objects, magnified by the size and also by the humor of a Pop Art master, the American Claes Oldenburg, died on July 18 in New York at the age of 93.
everyday objects, magnified by size and humor
Born January 28, 1929 in Stockholm, son of a diplomat and a lyric singer, he grew up in Chicago before following the courses of the University of Yale (and those, provided in the evening, of art Chicago Institute), then to become a journalist. In 1956, in New York, he met many artists including Allan Kaprow (1927-2006), considered one of the fathers of happening. This encourages him in this practice, which he nevertheless makes more sculptural with works like The Street (1959) an accumulation of trash, or The Store (1960 then 1961), a real Lower East Side store (his neighborhood, which is not the most upscale) in the window of which he presents consumer products.
But, unlike the new realists who would have used real objects, hers are sculpted (in collaboration with her first wife, Patricia Muschinski, known as Patty Mucha, artist also) with fabric and colorful plaster. The showcase of The Store offered the barrels an ice cream in its cone (approximately 3 meters long), a hamburger (1.5 meters by 2 meters) and a cake slice (2.7 meters)…
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