This exhibition spans fifty years of Claes Oldenburg's creative output, ranging from imagery precisely rendered and architecturally inspired to lyrical and freely drawn. Internationally known for his large-scale, site-specific sculptures made with Coosje van Bruggen (1942-2009), Oldenburg’s works on paper reveal how drawing is central to his creative process. Developing and reworking themes in various states, Oldenburg uses printmaking and editions as a way to explore themes of iteration, mechanical process, and object/body equivalents. Baseball bats and gym shoes, ice bags and light bulbs, pencils and typewriter erasers are everyday objects retooled as subjects.
Oldenburg began collaborating with the Los Angeles-based Gemini G.E.L. workshop in 1968 with Notes, a portfolio of twelve lithographs each accompanied by its own text. Included in the exhibition in its entirety, the portfolio parallels his long-standing practice of keeping notebooks with drawings, sketches, writings, and clippings from printed material.
Many of the works on view propose monuments imagined out of the banal stuff of life in uncanny scenarios — a baseball bat towers over a landscape, a massive slice of strawberry cheesecake floats in the East River, two threaded screws combine to form a bridge. Each proposal challenges the long historic tradition of civic monuments built to memorialize historic events, and Oldenburg subverts them with a playful exaggeration. These are monuments to the human experience and our relationship to the world of objects around us.
