Claes Thure Oldenburg

Perhaps the best-loved artist of the Pop Art movement, Claes Oldenburg is known for his playfully surreal sculptures that find new meaning in the everyday objects by expanding them to a gargantuan scale or deflating them into floppy, funny shells. A onetime journalist and illustrator in Chicago, Oldenburg fell in with Pop— a vernacular approach to art that mocked the somber bravado of Abstract Expressionism—after moving to New York in 1956. But whereas artists like Warhol and Lichtenstein took popular media as their inspiration, Oldenburg found his muse in hamburgers, electric fans, bagels, and other familiar comforts. His works can be found in institutions worldwide, including Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.