Claes Oldenburg

1929 -

American (b. Sweden)

Swedish born American artist Claes Oldenburg is perhaps best known for public sculpture in which he transforms commonplace objects like food, silverware, or machinery by enlarging, to monumental order, their scale. These humorous recontextualizations are located in museum parks and public spaces throughout the United States. He is also an extraordinary draftsman and frequently transforms his ideas from monumental outdoor sculpture and other works into drawings and prints that are imaginative variants of his ideas about their installations. In the 1960s he lived and worked in New York where he became associated with the Pop Art movement. He is associated with artists such as Jim Dine, Red Grooms, and Allan Kaprow, whose Happenings incorporated theatrical elements and provided an alternative to the Abstract Expressionism that had come to dominate much of the art scene."