Claes Oldenburg passed away on July 18 in the early hours of the morning at his home in Manhattan, where he was recovering from a hip injury sustained last month. He was most known for his huge, humorous sculptures of commonplace things, such as a clothespin, flashlight, baseball bat, and fried egg. He was 93. The two galleries that have long represented the artist, Paula Cooper and Pace, have both confirmed his passing.
Oldenburg, a Swedish diplomat’s son, was born in Stockholm in 1929; nevertheless, the family relocated to Chicago in 1936. He created the fictional nation of Neubern as a child, complete with its own language—a mashup of Swedish and English. His archives at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles are home to thousands of drawings, letters, and diaries, as well as drawings, maps, and other information about Neubern.
In 1995, Oldenburg was the focus of retrospective exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Another was put on by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2009, which mostly drew from its own collection of the artist’s drawings, sculptures, films, and archive materials.
