Claes Oldenburg (Stockholm, 1929 – NYC, 2022) moved to New York in 1956, where he encountered various artists involved in performance art. Between the late 1950s and early 1960s, he became a prominent figure in happenings and performance art. In 1959, the Judson Gallery in New York exhibited a series of enigmatic images by Oldenburg, ranging from monstrous human figures to everyday objects, created with a mix of drawings, collages, and papier-mâché.
In the 1960s, Oldenburg emerged as one of the leading figures of Pop Art, proposing colossal art projects for various cities. In 1969, his first of these iconic works, “Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks,” was installed at Yale University.
In 1995, a retrospective exhibition of his work was organized by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. In 2002, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York hosted another retrospective of his drawings, while the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York exhibited a selection of his sculptures on the museum’s rooftop during the same year.
© The New Yorker
