Nov 17, 2022 - Sale 2622

Sale 2622 - Lot 223

Price Realized: $ 5,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 5,000 - $ 8,000
CLAES OLDENBURG
Nude in Profile.

Brush and ink on cream wove paper, 1956. 271x312 mm; 10 3/4x12 1/4 inches. Signed and dated in ink, lower right recto.

Oldenburg (1929-2022) the Swedish-born American sculptor, best known for his public art installations featuring large replicas of everyday objects, created the current drawing during his early adult years in New York, where he initially worked in the library of the Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration. He had originally come to New York, the son of a Swedish diplomat, and then studied in Chicago (in 1953 became a naturalized citizen of the United States). During the late 1950s in New York, he met a number of artists, including Jim Dine, Red Grooms and Allan Kaprow, whose happenings incorporated theatrical aspects and provided an alternative to the abstract expressionism that had come to dominate much of the art scene. Oldenburg began toying with the idea of soft sculpture in 1957, when he completed a free-hanging piece made from a woman's stocking stuffed with newspaper. By 1960, he had produced sculptures containing simply rendered figures, letters, and signs, inspired by the Lower East Side, New York neighborhood where he lived, made out of materials such as cardboard, burlap, and newspapers; in 1961, he shifted his method, creating sculptures from chicken wire covered with plaster-soaked canvas and enamel paint, depicting everyday objects--articles of clothing and food items. By the mid-1960s he decided to move to Los Angeles, as a means to escape the New York art world, and soon after began to make drawings for and ultimately create the large scale sculpture of everyday objects for which he is best known and which aligned him with the Pop Art movement.

Provenance: Acquired directly from the artist by the photographer Marvin Newman (born 1927), New York; Newman had visited Oldenburg's Lower East Side studio and purchased the drawing directly from the artist, who needed the funds to restore his studio electricity, which had been switched off due to his failure to pay the electric bill.