CLAES OLDENBURG

Bread on breadboard

1962

Courtesy :

After his experience of Performance work at the end of the Fifties and his series of enigmatic pictures of monstruous human figures and everyday objects shown in 1959 at the Judson Gallery of New York, in 1961 Oldenburg opened in his studio a gallery-shop, The Store, where he exhibited sculptures inspired by products on sale in the local shops, in particular food produce. Intending to break down the barriers between art and real experience, Oldenburg celebrated American consumer society becoming one of the main protagonists of the emerging artistic movement of Pop (that is, “Popular”) Art, a term used of an art intended to be an expression of popular culture and to reflect all the visual stimuli of so-called “urban folklore”. A few months later Andy Warhol created pictures using tins of Campbells soup and bottles of Coca Cola, imitating the advertising barrage focussed on consumer goods.
In his sculptures of “inedible” food, presented here to visitors to the museum as if in a shop window, Oldenburg carries out an ironic, debunking operation, realistically reproducing
succulent food and dishes which he however colours and paints unnaturally, just as advertising does, in order to expose its powers of seduction and its commercial pull. His technique therefore acquires an alienating effect with respect to the functionality of the object reproduced. Besides his “inedible” food, in 1962 he created his first soft sculptures, made of hemp cloth or vinyl filled with foam rubber, for objects which have lost their functionality.

Stoccolma 1929
We don't copy the objects we use, we try to transform them and we hope they go on transforming as you look at them. The idea of endless public dialogue... visual dialogue... ...
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