NOT SOLD (BIDDING OVER)
0.00USD+ applicable fees & taxes.
This item WAS NOT SOLD. Auction date was 2003 May 15 @ 19:00UTC-05:00 : EST/CDT
CLAES OLDENBURG
(b. 1929)
SOFT LIGHT SWITCHES
vinyl
411/4 x 411/4 x 11 in.
(104.5 x 104.5 x 27.9 cm)
executed 1963-1969
ESTIMATE: $500,000-700,000
PROVENANCE
Acquired directly from the artist
Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles
Private collection, chicago
Edward Tyler Nahem Gallery, NEW YORK
EXHIBITED
Pasadena Art Museum; University Art Museum, University of California at Berkeley; KANSAS CITY, William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art; Fort Worth Art Center Museum; Des Moines Art Center and The Art Institute of Chicago, CLAES OLDENBURG, 1971-1972
Regarded as the unmistakable heir to the tradition of the readymade, a concept most notable brought into fruition by Marcel Duchamp, Claes Oldenburg infuses his work with comical energy and power through the inventive transformation of the everyday. But, as both a primary participant in early happenings and a paradigmatic Pop artist, Oldenburg fashioned objects that retain specific traces of their immediate environments, whether artistic or urban. Forging an original and exceedingly innovative art, Oldenburg insists on conceptual and physical intersections between object, space
and viewer.
Oldenburg's signature sculptures are extreme exaggerations, colossal variants of their natural scale. Sewn from the canvas or vinyl, these everyday objects are rendered doubly uncanny, the familiar made uncompromisingly strange: they are at once enlarged and tactilely transformed. Remaking the small as large and the rigid as malleable, Oldenburg embraces gigantism and softness to reimagine our usual experiences and redirect conventional expectations of monumental sculpture. The traditionally permanent and unmovable is rendered pliable and seemingly contingent. These soft sculptures embody the artist's most radical redefinition within the history of form.
In 1963, 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 conveyed in the soft versions. As German Celant has proposed, "Oldenburg intertwines the organic and the inorganic in his sculpture, conjoining human feelings and the physical properties of objects... [T]he object supplants the human body. It then becomes fraught with perturbations and passions, becomes swollen and agitated, rises and falls. Similarly, the human being is transformed into a physical object. The absurd condition-objects palpitating like humans, while humans are reduced to objects-is the crux of Oldenburg's understanding and procedure: the object is given life, while life is annulled in the object" (G. Celant, "Claes Oldenburg and the Feeling of Things," CLAES OLDENBURG: AN ANTHOLOGY, New York 1999, p. 13).
Auction Location:
United States
Previewing Details:
Saturday May 3, 2003 10am to 5pm, Sunday May 4, 2003 1pm to 5pm, Monday May 5, 2003 10am to 5pm, Tuesday May 6, 2003 10am to 5pm, Wednesday May 7, 2003 10am to 5pm, Thursday May 8, 2003 10am to 5pm, Friday May 9, 2003 10am to 5pm, Saturday May 10, 2003 10am to 5pm, Sunday May 11, 2003 1pm to 5pm, Monday May 12, 2003 10am to 5pm, Tuesday May 13, 2003 10am to 5pm, Wednesday May 14, 2003 10am to 5pm, Thursday May 15, 2003 10am to 2pm
Additional Fees:
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