Claes Oldenburg

Claes Oldenburg (1929-2022), born in Stockholm, Sweden, lived and worked in New York City from 1956 onward. A leading figure of American Pop Art and one of the most influential sculptors of the postwar period, he is best known for transforming familiar everyday objects into unexpected sculptures, often through radical shifts in scale, material and form. His early environments and performances, including The Street and The Store, challenged conventional ideas of sculpture, while his later soft sculptures and monumental public works turned objects such as food, household items and consumer goods into playful and often monumental forms. In collaboration with Coosje van Bruggen, he created numerous large-scale public sculptures that brought this approach into the urban landscape.
With the permission of Claes Oldenburg, we have compiled the most comprehensive survey of his editioned works to date, documented in a freely accessible digital resource on Ars Publicata.