Claes Oldenburg: The Sixties

Description

This comprehensive monograph explores the conceptual complexity and diversity of Claes Oldenburg's early work to reveal the influential artist's extraordinary inventiveness. Accompanying an exhibition of Oldenburg's seminal early work, this publication examines in depth the breadth of his artistic career from the late-1950s to 1970. It features works including the landmark installations The Street and The Store and their accompanying Happenings; the highly influential spectacular sculptures of everyday objects, as well as drawings and preparatory collages for public projects from the 1960s. The book traces the development of Oldenburg's practice as it follows his work up to the Mouse Museum. Included also in the book is an extensive chronology, alongside notes as well as a variety of installation views that showcase the careful consideration given to modes of presentation. In addition to imagery of his infamous Pop icons, the publication includes illustrations of materials that have never been shown, such as notebook pages, preparatory studies, photographs taken by the artist, drawings and collages, and clippings with amusing advertisements from the 1960s that served as models for his sculptures. Richly illustrated and including a wealth of previously unpublished materials, this volume probes diverse aspects of his work to offer fresh perspectives on Oldenburg's artistic development and unprecedented insights into the conceptual process of his artistic explorations.

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Claes Oldenburg: Early Work

Description

Much of the seminal 1960s sculpture documented in this catalogue is from Claes Oldenburg's personal collection and had never been shown until it was gathered on the occasion of the artist's first major historical New York exhibition since his Guggenheim retrospective of 1995. Included are a large selection of objects from The Store; early soft sculptures from The Home; and works related to the Airflow project. Scholars and new initiates alike will enjoy Oldenburg's earliest riffs on street life (yard-long gym shoes), household objects (plump fabric light switches and toilets) and automobile culture, explored and transformed through innovative manipulations of scale and material into mysterious, formally inventive works that address human experience in modern life. An insightful essay by Julia E. Robinson points to relationships with the work of Daumier, Dubuffet and Manet.

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Claes Oldenburg: Raw Notes

Description

A giant spoon with an enormous red cherry snaking out of the earth, a humongous badminton birdie, an oversized piece of cake, squishy scupltures--these are some of the works for which Claes Oldenburg, the artist who helped redefine sculpture in the 1960s, is best known. However, because they have been less documented, Oldenburg's happenings and performances have not been fully integrated into the critical discourse surrounding his work. Raw Notes, originally published in 1973, collects all of the material relating to his performances. According to his specifications, the text in the book is typed rather then set, and appears on only one side of the page. Examples of the original manuscript are reproduced in 63 script plates. These include stage plans, scores, sketches for programs, and posters. More than 200 annotations by the author expand the text. Raw Notes is indispensable as a document of the important aspects of Oldenburg's work.

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Claes Oldenburg (October Files)

Description

Claes Oldenburg (born in 1929) is largely known today as a pop art sculptor. Oldenburg himself described his formless canvas and vinyl soft sculptures--gigantic hamburgers and ice cream cones, cushiony toilets and typewriters--as "objects that elude definition." This collection of writings revisits not only Oldenburg's soft objects from the early to mid 1960s but also his pioneering installations The Street (1960) and The Store (1961--1962) and his often overlooked multimedia performances. As the artist translated his ideas and beliefs into various media and formats, his work drew on a range of styles and schools, including abstract expressionism, Happenings, pop art, minimalism, and postminimalism. Perhaps because of their refusal to be classified, these artworks are as contemporary today as they were when they were created between 1960 and 1965.

This collection serves both as a summation of early critical thinking on Oldenburg's art and a starting point for consideration of the artist as a forerunner of current art trends of stylelessness and intermediality. It includes both contemporary criticism and more recent scholarly reassessments, interviews with the artist, and Oldenburg's own unpublished manifesto on the Ray Gun Theater (the artist's name for his performance series in the back of The Store).

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Claes Oldenburg, Coosje Van Bruggen

Description

This catalogue of the exhibition curated by Germano Celant in the Correr Museum of Venice investigates a specific aspect of the work of Claes Oldenburg, a major figure of contemporary American art: that of his creations relating to architecture, documenting the large scale projects executed by the artist between 1969 right up to 1999. Here is an opportunity to discover and appreciate the monumental constructions the artist executed all over the world, from Chicago and Philadelphia, Paris and Dusseldorf, Frankfurt to Weil am Rhein, including the latest, original project the artist intends to execute with Coosje van Bruggen for Venice, a lion's tail that, issuing from the Napolconic Wing, will partially take over the space in front of San Marco. The book, aside from the exhibited works, features the forty-eight projects executed on every continent, an offers valuable scientific knowledge of workings of the great American artist, and reflects on the controversial issue of art in public spaces, and the essential collaboration between the artist and the public.

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Printed Stuff: Prints, Poster, and Ephemera by Claes Oldenburg A Catalogue Raisonne 1958-1996

Description

The printmaking career of a leading Pop artist, influential creator of public monuments, and bravura draftsman. More than 250 limited-edition graphics.

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