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
My mother warned me to avoid things colored red.
All the fun is locking horns with impossibilities.
Chicago has a strange metaphysical elegance of death about it.
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.
I don't do abstract art because I don't find it as interesting as I do subjects and depictions.
I am for an art of things lost or thrown away. . . I am for an art that one smokes like a cigarette. . . I am for an art that flutters like a flag.
I like food because you can change it. I mean, there is no such thing as a perfect lamb chop; you can make all types of lamb chops. And that's true of everything. And people eat it and it changes and disappears.
I was always interested in drawing. As a child, I started my own country, which was called Neubern. It was located in the South Atlantic. I did the documentation of Neubern in great detail. I drew everything that was there, all the houses and all the cars and all the people. We even had a navy and an air force. I spent a lot of time drawing.
For a thorough use of ice cream cones, buy two; eat one and drop the other.
They asked me to do a show, and I was planning on showing my figure paintings. But my friends told me I shouldn't - the paintings were good but a little old-fashioned. They said, "Why don't you show the other stuff?" I had also been making rather strange objects, more in the Freudian tradition.
I am for the art of underwear and the art of taxicabs. I am for the art of ice cream cones dropped on concrete.
I got a little studio in Chicago and practiced. I realized I had to earn some money. So I went to work for an advertising agency where my job was mostly drawing insects for a company that sold an insecticide spray.
If I didn't think what I was doing had something to do with enlarging the boundaries of art, I wouldn't go on doing it.