“He was recovering from a fall and died at his home and in his studio in New York,” Pace Gallery said in a message sent to AFP.
Its founder, Arne Glimcher, hailed “one of the most radical artists of the 20th century”, who “changed the very nature of sculpture” and whose “influence is still perceptible today”.
Burgers, an ice cream cone or an electrical outlet: these gigantic sculptures have made Claes Oldenburg an artist appreciated by critics and the public. His works have often been seen by millions of people in the public places where they were exhibited.
“Together with his wife and longtime collaborator, Coosje van Bruggen (who died in 2009), Oldenburg carried out more than 40 large-scale public projects all over the world,” Pace Galleries write.
Anti-war
Among his works, “The lipstick mounted on a tank”, exhibited on the campus of Yale University in the late 1960s, caused a sensation and became a symbol for opponents of the American war in Vietnam. .
A clothespin, still visible in Philadelphia, where you can read the numbers “76”, also marked the bicentenary of the American declaration of independence in 1976.
Born in 1929 in Stockholm, Claes Oldenburg grew up in particular in Chicago, where his diplomat father was Consul General of Sweden. He studied at Yale University, then at the “School of the Art Institute of Chicago”, and moved to New York in the 1950s.
“Oldenburg came to prominence in New York in the late 1950s and early 1960s when he staged his Happenings – a series of delirious installations and performances inspired by his surroundings,” in the district of the Lower East Side, in Manhattan, tell the Pace galleries in their tribute.
“I am for an art that mixes with everyday shit and still emerges victorious. I am for an art which imitates the human, which is comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary,” he wrote in his manifesto in 1961.
Claes Oldenburg has notably been the subject of exhibitions at MoMA, the Whitney Museum in New York, and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.
