Claes Oldenburg

Bilbao

With his humorous and profound depictions of everyday objects, Claes Oldenburg is one of the most important and popular artists since the late 1950s. Not only has he been a major figure in performance art, installation art and pop art, but he has also, through his partnership with Coosje van Bruggen, had a profound influence on public art with their monumental large-scale projects. One central point of reference in Oldenburg’s oeuvre is the industrially produced object—the object as commodity, which in continuous metamorphoses of media and form becomes a conveyer of culture and a symbol of the imagination, desires, and obsessions of the capitalist world.

Claes Oldenburg: The Sixties is the largest show realized of Oldenburg’s path-breaking and emblematic early work from the 1960s. Numerous icons of contemporary art are on show, beginning with the installation ‚The Street‘ (1960) and its graffiti-inspired depictions of modern life in the big city, continuing to the famous consumer articles of ‚The Store‘ (1961-62), to the spectacular everyday objects of the „modern home“. The exhibition is also dedicated to Oldenburg’s first designs depicting enormous monuments of consumer objects intended for public spaces and concludes with the Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien’s Mouse Museum, a walk-in, miniature museum in the form of a geometric mouse, for which Oldenburg has collected 385 objects since the late 1950s.

Claes Oldenburg

Guggenheim Bilbao

October 30th, 2012 – February 17th, 2013
Avenida Abandoibarra, 2
48001 Bilbao
Spain

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