Opening and closing dates: from October 30. 2012 to February 17, 2013
Curated by: Achim Hodchdörfer, Curator of the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (mumok)
Sponsored by: Fundación BBVA
Venues: mumok Vienna, Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis
Co-organized by mumok Vienna and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Claes Oldenburg: The Sixties is the largest show to date dedicated to the path-breaking, emblematic, early work of the 1960s by Claes Oldenburg (Stockholm, Sweden, 1929), one of the most influential artists since the 1950s. The presentation in Bilbao has been made possible thanks to the generous sponsorship of Fundación BBVA, and with support from the Terra Foundation for American Art.
With his ironic and sharp witted representations of everyday objects from the 1960s, Oldenburg made a huge contribution to renovating the North American art scene, and is a major figure in performance art, installation art and Pop Art. However, his multifaceted body of work goes much further. He has also had a profound influence on art in public spaces with his monumental large-scale projects in numerous major cities worldwide, created in partnership with Coosje van Bruggen.
One central point of reference in Oldenburg’s oeuvre is the industrially produced object—the object as commodity, which in ever new metamorphoses of media and form becomes a conveyer of culture and symbol of the imagination, desires, and obsessions of the capitalist world.