Claes Oldenburg

Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929) is the Swedish son of a diplomat whose family moved to Chicago in 1936. After earning a degree in Art History from Yale, he attended the Art Institute of Chicago where he graduated in 1954. Two years later, he moved to New York where he participated in a movement called Happenings with other artists such as Jim Dine, Red Grooms, Robert Whitman, and Dick Higgins throughout the 1950’s and ‘60s. In 1961 he opened an exhibition in his studio called The Store where he recreated familiar objects in stores in American neighborhoods. During the late 1960s and 1970s Oldenburg created several large-scale outdoor works for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University. In 1977, he married Coosje van Bruggen whom he collaborated with on nearly all of these large-scale works.

Oldenburg’s successful career has been honored in four retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1969); the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1995); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1995); and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2002). Today, Oldenburg resides and works in California, New York, and France.