In 1961, Claes Oldenburg (1929-2022) penned his best-known text, \u201cI Am For\u2026,\u201d a roughly 700-word statement for an exhibition catalogue. He later called it a \u201cslightly satirical ode or paean to the possibilities of using anything in one\u2019s surroundings (mostly urban) as a starting point for art.\u201d Often labeled a manifesto, the artist maintained it was not. That restless openness to form and subject would underpin decades of sculpture that magnifies the everyday.<\/p>\n
Oldenburg\u2019s large-scale installations recast familiar tools and utensils at startling scale. \u201cSpoonbridge and Cherry\u201d (1988), made with Coosje van Bruggen, spans a pond at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. \u201cBig Sweep\u201d (2006) greets visitors at the entrance of the Denver Art Museum with a broom corralling crumpled paper into a dust pan. In Washington, D.C., the National Gallery of Art\u2019s Sculpture Garden hosts \u201cTypewriter Eraser, Scale X\u201d (1998-99), whose rubber wheel seems to surge forward as its bristles stream in the wind. Rather than rely on found items, Oldenburg restudied and re-created forms from every angle, working with a team to fabricate works that remain recognizably ordinary yet newly strange.<\/p>\n
From the 1970s onward, Oldenburg delved into six recurring subjects\u2014Geometric Mouse, Three-Way Plug, Fagends, Clothespin, Typewriter Eraser, and Standing Mitt with Ball\u2014through sketches, models, and full-scale sculptures. He enlarged the clothespin until it read like a figure, and also pursued soft studies stitched in canvas, such as \u201c1st Eraser Prototype\u201d (1970), acrylic on sewn, stuffed canvas. \u201cFagend Study, Prototype\u201d (1976) and \u201cGeometric Mouse \u2013 Scale C\u201d (1971) reflect the breadth of this inquiry across materials and scales. As he put it, \u201ca requirement of any subject is that it be extremely adaptable, especially in scale, so that a small clothespin would be as interesting as a clothespin a hundred feet high.\u201d<\/p>\n
That adaptability is evident across realizations from a ten-foot \u201cClothespin\u201d (1974) to the large-scale \u201cClothespin\u201d (1976) in Cor-Ten steel and stainless steel at Center Square Plaza, Fifteenth and Market streets, Philadelphia. Over time, as tools like the typewriter eraser and the movie film projector\u2014the profile of which informed Geometric Mouse\u2014have slipped into obsolescence, Oldenburg\u2019s motifs have taken on an unintended abstraction.<\/p>\n
Several sculptures from the series go on view next month at Paula Cooper Gallery in Six Themes, a title that reprises the landmark survey mounted at the Walker Art Center in 1975 and later seen at the Denver Art Museum, Seattle Art Museum, New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. The new exhibition brings together significant works representing all six subjects, including rarely seen examples from the artist\u2019s estate and private collections. On view in New York from November 5 through December 19, it reunites ideas that have not been presented together since their first showing 50 years ago. (An installation view of \u201cClaes Oldenburg: Six Themes\u201d was also documented at MIT Hayden Gallery, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1976.)<\/p>\n
Half a century on, Oldenburg\u2019s themes remain elastic, mischievous, and vividly of the world\u2014exactly as his 1961 statement proposed.<\/p>\n