Biography: Claes Oldenburg

Claes Oldenburg was born on January 28th, 1929 in Stockholm Sweden. He and his family moved to the US in 1936, first to New York and then to Chicago where he grew up. He studied at Yale from 1946-1950 and then at the Art Institute of Chicago until 1954. In 1956, Oldenburg moved to New York where he befriended Jim Dines, Red Grooms, and Allen Kaprow. Kaprow's "Happenings" inspired Oldenburg to look at everyday objects in a new light. Oldenburg is interested in the physical objects of mass culture and also monuments. In 1961, he rented an actual store on 2nd St., on New York's Lower East Side, and filled it with oversized objects made of paper mache, canvas and resin. He made shirts and socks, a sewing machine, a huge cheeseburger, and slices of pie. He chose objects with a specific architecture - things that were made up of basic geometric structures. Oldenburg changed the scale and the materials of these objects. Soft things were made of hard materials and hard things he made soft and flacid. In these objects, Oldenburg saw metaphors for the human form.