Claes Oldenburg

Pace Gallery is pleased to announce Claes Oldenburg: Shelf Life, an exhibition of new work by the artist including 15 mixed-media sculptures and a series of mouse shopping bags. Shelf Life is the first exhibition of new work by Oldenburg in twelve years. A full-color catalogue accompanies the exhibition, including a new text by Oldenburg.

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 originated as small-scale individual sculptures of objects ranging from bowling pins to a paintbrush and a slice of pizza—created by the artist in diverse materials, some as durable as iron and others as fragile as paper plates. Oldenburg organized the objects on a series of identically designed shelves (each measuring 19 15/16" x 28 3/4" x 12 3/16"), arranging, rearranging, and recreating them until the pieces found their proper place in juxtaposition 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 united 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.”

Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929, Stockholm, Sweden) is recognized as a leading figure in the Pop Art movement, and came to prominence in the New York art scene of the late 1950s and early 1960s. First developed as props created for a series of performative Happenings, Oldenburg’s oeuvre prompts our reconsideration of everyday things and commodities. Exploring the relationships between objects, the body, and landscape, his later production of large-scale sculpture led to a decades-long collaboration with art historian and curator Coosje van Bruggen (b. 1942, Groningen, Netherlands; d. 2009, Los Angeles). Together, Oldenburg and van Bruggen produced sculpture, drawings, performances, and colossal monuments that transform the familiar into the unexpected.