Claes Oldenburg

New York City

The current exhibition at Pace Prints showcases over four decades of Oldenburg’s self-proclaimed “printed stuff,” beginning with Store Poster, 1961 and Flying Pizza, 1964 though Falling Notes, 2006.

Claes Oldenburg is most often considered a sculptor of monumental Pop works for public spaces, but drawing and draftsmanship have always been central to the artist’s creative process. Oldenburg frequently transforms his ideas for outdoor sculptures into drawings and prints that are imaginative variants of his ideas about their installation.

In true Pop fashion, Oldenburg populates his world with banal objects utilized by humans for mundane purposes. The artist then recreates them, inflating the size or scope, and reappropriates the objects for his own artistic use. Clothespins, scissors, screws, lipstick tubes, food products, letters of the alphabet, and parts of the human body become monumental sculptures and Pace Prints’ exhibition features Screwarch Bridge (State III) from 1980, a proposal for an imaginary bridge across the river Maas in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Envisioning this monumental bridge, Oldenburg was inspired by his travels in The Netherlands with his late wife, Coosje van Bruggen, and by seventeenth century Dutch etchings.

Pace Prints

May 10th – June 16th, 2012
32 East 57th Street
New York, NY 10022
USA

Calendar