Pace Prints is proud to present an exhibition of editioned work by Claes Oldenburg. The exhibition will showcase over four decades of Oldenburg’s self-proclaimed “printed stuff,” beginning with Store Poster, 1961 and Flying Pizza, 1964 though Falling Notes, 2006.
Claes Oldenburg is most often considered a sculptor of monumental Pop works for public spaces, but drawing and draftsmanship have always been central to the artist’s creative process. Oldenburg frequently transforms his ideas for outdoor sculptures into drawings and prints that are imaginative variants of his ideas about their installation.
In true Pop fashion, Oldenburg populates his world with banal objects utilized by humans for mundane purposes. The artist then recreates them, inflating the size or scope, and reappropriates the objects for his own artistic use. Clothespins, scissors, screws, lipstick tubes, food products, letters of the alphabet, and parts of the human body become monumental sculptures and Pace Prints’ exhibition will feature Screwarch Bridge(State III) from 1980, a proposal for an imaginary bridge across the river Maas in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Envisioning this monumental bridge, Oldenburg was inspired by his travels in The Netherlands with his late wife, Coosje van Bruggen, and by seventeenth century Dutch etchings.
Claes Oldenburg was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1929 and is currently living and working in New York. He has been actively exhibiting his work around the world for over five decades. He has had solo exhibitions of his works at institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Many public institutions have included Oldenburg’s work in their collections, including The Art Institution of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris. Claes Oldenburg is represented by The Pace Gallery. The Pace Gallery is currently having an exhibition of the artist’s works, Claes Oldenburg / Coosje van Bruggen: Theater and Installation 1985-1990, which will be at 545 West 22nd Street, New York, and will be open to the public from April 27th to June 23rd, 2012.