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Oldenburg, Claes (Thure)
(b Stockholm, 28 Jan 1929). American sculptor, draughtsman, printmaker, performance artist and writer of Swedish birth. He was brought from Sweden to the USA as an infant and moved with his family to Chicago in 1936 following his father’s appointment to the consulship there. Except for four years of study (1946–50) at Yale University in New Haven, CT, during which time he decided to pursue a career in art, Chicago remained his home until his move to New York in 1956. Within two years of this move, Oldenburg had become part of a group of artists who challenged Abstract Expressionism by modifying its thickly impastoed bravura paint with figurative images and found objects. Oldenburg’s first one-man show in 1959, at the Judson Gallery in New York, included figurative drawings and papier mâché sculptures. For his second show, also at the Judson Gallery, in 1960, shared with Jim Dine, Oldenburg transformed his expressionist, figurative paintings into a found-object environment, The Street; this consisted of urban debris and flat silhouetted figures, signs and objects, the ragged, blackened contours and monochrome black-brown tones of which recalled the colours and textures of the decaying urban slums.
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