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CLAES OLDENBURG (b. 1929) LIGHT SWITCHES - HARD VERSION painted wood, formica and metal 47 3/4 x ...

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CLAES OLDENBURG (b. 1929) LIGHT SWITCHES - HARD VERSION painted wood, formica and metal 47 3/4 x ...
CLAES OLDENBURG
(b. 1929)
LIGHT SWITCHES - HARD VERSION
painted wood, formica and metal
47 3/4 x 47 3/4 x 11 3/4 in.
(121.3 x 121.3 x 29.9 cm)
executed in 1964 <p>PROVENANCE
Sidney Janis Gallery, NEW YORK <p>EXHIBITED
NEW YORK, Sidney Janis Gallery, CLAES OLDENBURG: RECENT WORKS, April 7-May 2, 1964, no. 15
STOCKHOLM, Moderna Museet, CLAES OLDENBURG, September 18-October 20, 1966
Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The Philadelphia Museum of Art, AMERICAN SCULPTURE OF THE SIXTIES, April 28-October 29, 1967
NEW YORK, The Museum of Modern Art, CLAES OLDEnBURG, September 22-November 23, 1969, p. 130 (illustrated)
NEW YORK, Whitney Museum of American Art, BLAM! THE EXPLOSION OF POP, MINIMALISM, AND PERFORMANCES 1958-1964, September 19-December 2, 1984
Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, ELECTRA, December 10, 1983-February 5, 1984, pp. 288-289, no. eM90 (illustrated)
WASHINGTON, DC, National Gallery of Art; LOS ANGELES, The Museum of Contemporary Art; NEW YORK, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; BONN, Kunst-und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland and LONDON, Hayward Gallery, CLAES OLDENBURG: AN ANTHOLOGY, February 12, 1995-August 19, 1996, p. 201, fig. 106 (illustrated)
Throughout his prolific career, Claes Oldenburg has sustained a practice that could be characterized as an inventive transformation of the everyday. Certainly he is the unmistakable heir to the tradition of the readymade as an alternative to painting, a practice most notably conceived by Marcel Duchamp. Forging an original and exceedingly innovative art, Oldenburg insists on the conceptual and physical intersections between object, space, and viewer. Oldenburg's signature sculptures are extreme exaggerations, colossal variants of their natural scale. These everyday objects are rendered uncanny, the familiar made uncompromisingly strange: they are at once enlarged and transformed. Remaking the small as large, Oldenburg embraces gigantism to reimagine our usual experiences and redirect conventional expectations of monumental sculpture.
In the mid-1960s, Oldenburg created many of his oversized objects, like his electrical outlets and light switches, in two versions - hard and soft - as if to underscore the significance of his innovative reconstructions of form and especially to intensify the heightened anthropomorphism of both versions. Whether in the vinyl version, AS SOFT LIGHT SWITCHES (1963-1969) with its organic fleshiness, or in the painted wood version as in LIGHT SWITCHES-HARD VERSION (1964), for Oldenburg, the subject matter moved "far enough away to be on the verge of disappearing from function into archetype" (Oldenburg quoted in B. Rose, CLAES OLDENBURG, NEW YORK, 1970, p. 97).
In 1963, Oldenburg began to fully develop his ideas on the theme of the home from which would stem a family of works based on domestic objects. This same year, he created one of his most iconic works, Bedroom Ensemble, which Oldenburg has described as an attempt to "find a common ground between the minimalist experiment and what I wanted to do, furniture" (C. van Bruggern, CLAES OLDENBURG, FRANKFURT, 1991, p. 38). Moreover, Oldenburg has stated that by choosing everyday objects as the subject matter for his exploration of form, he imagines an "innocent version, "I try to look at the things as if I had never seen them before, as if I were a Martian and didn't know what they were for, had no idea of the function of the things, was only interested in the structure of it... The minute you give a name to a thing, you cloud or you hide the innocent vision" (CLAES OLDENBURG: AN ANTHOLOGY, New York, 1995, p. 4).
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