Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen

One of the best-loved artists associated with the Pop Art movement, Claes Oldenburg is known for playfully surreal sculptures that find new meaning in everyday objects by expanding them to a gargantuan scale or deflating them into floppy, whimsical simulacra. A onetime journalist and illustrator in Chicago, Oldenburg fell in with the emerging Pop artists after arriving in New York in 1956. But whereas many of his contemporaries took popular media as their inspiration, Oldenburg found his muse in familiar objects, such as food, clothes, gadgets, and other household comforts.

In the 1970s, Oldenburg began collaborating on large-scale public sculptures with the Dutch art historian Coosje van Bruggen, whom he married in 1977. Van Bruggen helped Oldenburg to rehab earlier works, such as his 1971 sculpture Trowel I.  Together, they created such iconic public artworks as Minneapolis's Spoonbridge and Cherry—a giant sculpture of a spoon balancing a ripe cherry—and Cologne's Dropped Cone, a vanilla ice cream cone plopped upside-down onto the corner of a shopping mall building. By manipulating the scale and context of consumer goods, these mischievous public artworks transformed the ordinary into the extraordinary and used levity to ask complicated questions about the nature of desire and value. 

A pillar of postwar art, Oldenburg has been collected by museums around the world and has been given several major retrospectives. His work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others. Van Bruggen, in addition to her work with Oldenburg, has also acted as an independent curator and critic worldwide, including work for Documenta 7, lecturer at Yale University, and writing on Oldenburg and her work with him.