Oldenburg / van Bruggen. Shelf Life

About

In its accumulative nature and its presentation of seemingly random objects, Shelf Life draws significant inspiration from a number of Oldenburg’s most iconic exhibitions, particularly The Mouse Museum originally created for documenta 5 (1972) and the pioneering Pop art exhibition The Store (1961). The new works re-contextualize small-scale sculptures ranging in subject from bowling pins to a paintbrush and a slice of pizza—created by the artist and Coosje van Bruggen in diverse materials, some as durable as iron and others as fragile as paper plates, as well as found objects from the artist’s shelves. Oldenburg organized the objects on a set of custom-made shelves (each measuring 19 15/16" x 28 3/4" x 12 3/16") inspired by a particular standard office shelf unit in his studio, arranging, rearranging, and recreating them until the pieces found their proper place with one another.

Taken together, the sculptures in Shelf Life represent a compendium of the ideas and objects that have resonated throughout Oldenburg’s life and practice, now revealed in completely new relationships. As an artist pivotal to the evolution of contemporary art throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, Oldenburg has approached this latest period of his career as, he said, “a time to decide what one keeps.” These are the images he has chosen to keep.

“It has been my privilege to have worked with Claes Oldenburg since the early 1960s when the Pace Gallery, still in Boston, presented elements from The Store in 1964,” says Arne Glimcher, Pace Gallery Founder. “This new body of work, with its nostalgia for the past and its optimism for the future, marks the beginning of a new period in his work. His radical combination of ideas continues his obsession with the elasticity of imagery."