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
You can take an object and simply put anything you want in that object, and I accessed that partly through Freudian ideas.
There's always been a potential erotic possibility with objects.
When you're working with an object, you can put in almost anything you want, you can make it abstract.
I think of a monument as being symbolic and for the people and therefore rhetorical, not honest, not personal.
In 1958 I finally found a large enough apartment on the Lower East Side, where I reverted to figure painting. I drew and painted quite a lot of figures and nudes. People would come and pose for me.
It was easy to get a job at the Cedar Bar because people came and went, but I didn't like the atmosphere. Instead, I got a job at Cooper Union Library. I stayed at Cooper Union for seven years; it was my salvation. While I worked there, I also read books of every kind.
Actually, New York is great for playing around. I made a lot of studies for New York-a big vacuum cleaner lying on the Battery in Manhattan.
Judson Church was a very important place because they believed in art. They also took care of drug addicts. Without the Judson, nothing could have happened.
I think the Freudian impulse is in everything, so I just accept it. I don't always believe what Freud is saying but it sounds like fun.
Ox-Bow was a very free place, very open. You could do whatever you wanted to do.
I went back to the Art Institute, then spent the summer at the Ox-Bow School in Saugatuck, Michigan. That's what really awakened me. I made a lot of oil paintings and my first performance.
I had, over the years, collected things, small things, as people do, and I had put them all together and showed them in what became a building in the form of the Geometric Mouse.
I got a job as a dishwasher in Oakland, and I would draw all day. It was nice because the lady who ran the boardinghouse where I worked let me live there for nothing if I gave her some drawings every week - mostly park drawings of birds and such.
I knew I had to take my ambition more seriously, so I enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago. Then, in the fall, I went on a tour of my own. I didn't go to New York because that was too well known for its art scene.