Claes Oldenburg obituary

Pop artist famed for his ‘soft sculptures’ and outsized monuments to everyday objects<p>Had the ideas of Claes Oldenburg been realised, Piccadilly Circus would have had as its hub not a 19th-century sculpture of Eros but a cluster of 8m-high orange lipsticks or a skyscraper-sized pair of women’s knees. Both projects were imagined for the site by the Swedish-American artist and sculptor, who has died at the age of 93.</p><p>In London in 1966, Oldenburg found himself captivated by what he called the “paradoxical combination of masculine voyeurism and feminine liberation” bound up in Mary Quant and the miniskirt. Neither <a href="https://www.moma.org/collection/works/77314" title="">London Knees</a> nor Lipsticks made it past maquette stage – the postcard collage <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/oldenburg-lipsticks-in-piccadilly-circus-london-t01694" title="">Lipsticks in Piccadilly Circus, London</a> (1966) is now in the Tate collection – but if the works had been created, they would have raised the same questions about civic art that Oldenburg’s sculptures were to pose everywhere from Minneapolis to Münster. </p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/jul/18/claes-oldenburg-obituary">Continue reading...</a>