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Curated by Achim Hodchdörfer, Curator of the Museum Moderner Kunst
Stiftung Ludwig Wien (mumok).
Co-organized by mumok Vienna and
the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Claes Oldenburg: The Sixties is the
largest show to date dedicated to the path-breaking, emblematic, early work
of the 1960s by Claes Oldenburg (Stockholm, Sweden, 1929), one of the most
influential artists since the 1950s. The presentation in Bilbao has been
made possible thanks to the generous sponsorship of Fundación BBVA,
and with support from the Terra Foundation for American Art.
With his ironic and sharp witted representations of everyday objects from
the 1960s, Oldenburg made a huge contribution to renovating the North
American art scene, and is a major figure in performance art, installation
art and Pop Art. However, his multifaceted body of work goes much further.
He has also had a profound influence on art in public spaces with his
monumental large-scale projects in numerous major cities worldwide, created
in partnership with Coosje van Bruggen.
One central point of
reference in Oldenburg's oeuvre is the industrially produced
object—the object as commodity, which in ever new metamorphoses of
media and form becomes a conveyer of culture and symbol of the imagination,
desires, and obsessions of the capitalist world.
The Guggenheim
Museum Bilbao will showcase a magnificent selection of nearly 300 works on
Museum's second floor galleries. The exhibition will begin with the
installation The Street and its graffiti-inspired depictions
of modern life in the big city, and continue to the famous consumer
articles of The Store and to the spectacular everyday objects of the
"modern home."
The exhibition also dedicates a section to
Oldenburg's early designs for public spaces around the world and to his
emblematic Mouse Museum, a walk-in miniature museum in the form of a
Geometric Mouse, for which Oldenburg has collected 381 objects since
the late 1950s.
Lastly, owing to the Claes Oldenburg's close
collaboration on the project, the exhibit will also include a series of
works that have rarely or never before been seen: drawings, photographs and
films by the artist himself, and especially notebook pages that offer
unique insights into the witty thought processes of the artist.
Sponsored by Fundación BBVA.
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