(New York) He was known for his monumental sculptures of everyday objects: the American pop-art artist of Swedish origin Claes Oldenburg died Monday at the age of 92 in New York, announced one of the galleries that represented him.
Posted at 2:09 p.m.
“He was recovering from a fall and died at his home and studio in New York,” Pace Gallery said in a message to AFP.
Its founder, Arne Glimcher, hailed “one of the most radical artists of the 20th century”, who “changed the very nature of sculpture” and whose “influence is still perceptible today”.
Burgers, an ice cream cone or an electrical outlet: these gigantic sculptures have made Oldenburg an artist appreciated by critics and the public. His works were often seen by millions of people in the public places where they were exhibited.
Among them, the lipstick on the tracks of a tank, displayed on the campus of Yale University in the late 1960s, caused a sensation and became a symbol for opponents of the American war in Vietnam. .
A clothespin, on display in Philadelphia, also marked the bicentenary of the American Declaration of Independence in 1976.
PHOTO DAN LOH, ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVES
A clothespin, on display in Philadelphia, also marked the bicentenary of the American Declaration of Independence in 1976.
From the 1970s, he had worked as a duo with his wife, Coosje van Bruggen, who died in 2009.
“I’m for an art that mixes with everyday shit and still emerges victorious. I am for an art which imitates the human, which is comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary”, he wrote in his manifesto, in 1961.
Claes Oldenburg has notably been the subject of exhibitions at the MoMA or the Whitney Museum in New York, or even at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.