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 rule was not to paint things as they were. I wasn't copying; I was remaking them as my own.
The main reason for the colossal objects is the obvious one, to expand and intensify the presence of the vessel - the object.
I knew I wasn't that good a writer, and all I could remember was that I could draw. I'm better at drawing than I am at writing.
I am preoccupied with the possibility of creating art which functions in a public situation without compromising its private character of being antiheroic, antimonumental, antiabstract, and antigeneral. The paradox is intensified by the use on a grand scale of small-scale subjects known from intimate situations--an approach which tends in turn to reduce the scale of the real landscape to imaginary dimensions.
I am for an art that tells you the time of day, or where such and such a street is. I am for an art that helps old ladies across the street.
Art is a technique of communication. The image is the most complete technique of all communication.
I am an immigrant in a sense. What happened was that my father was stationed in New York when my mother became pregnant, and she said, "I've got to go to Sweden so this child can be born there, because you don't have any idea where you're going to be transferred next."
I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all.
I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.
Food is like clay; you can sculpt with it. Also it has an odor, and you can eat it. I don't eat a lot of cake, but I do make cakes! And unlike the Campbell's Soup Cans, my food is a humanized form and scale.
I had no idea what art was. There was one art class in high school, but it didn't make a big impression on me. Then I went to college and thought I'd become a writer.
I'm in favor of an art that does something other than just sit on its ass in a museum.
Because my work is naturally non-meaningful, the meaning found in it will remain doubtful and inconsistent - which is the way it should be. All that I care about is that, like any startling piece of nature, it should be capable of stimulating meaning.
Everything I do is completely original-I made it up when I was a kid.