American sculptor Claes Oldenburg, pioneer of 'pop art', dies at 93

American artist Claes Oldenburg, pioneer of

, has died this Monday at the age of 93 in New York.

Born in Stockholm on January 28, 1929, he was known above all for his installations that replicated large-scale everyday objects.

Oldenburg, the son of a diplomat, lived in Oslo until 1936, when the family moved to Chicago, where his father was a consul.

Majoring in art and literature at Yale University, he later was an alumnus of the Art Institute of Chicago.

He exhibited his work for the first time in a group show in 1953 in Chicago.

Until he was able to start living from his work, he earned a living in the music department of a bookstore and as an illustrator for a magazine, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao reported on this artist.

“The artist is a machine, but a human machine, hypersensitive,

Among his first works stands out, in 1961, the installation

(The Store), which could be visited for two months in a Manhattan establishment.

In 1964 he was selected for the collective that represented the United States at the Venice Biennale.

The following year he began to create his first proposals for large urban monuments, always with irony, humor and the colorism of pop, in city parks and gardens, with large-scale objects such as spoons, combs, ice creams, rubber stamps , banknotes... “I suppose there is a certain irony in my work, it is also the way I look at the world.

I am serious but I realize that the world is fun and it would be difficult for me to live without seeing that side of things, their contradictions”, he affirmed about his way of conceiving his pieces.

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Oldenburg exhibition at the "Georges Pompidou"

In 1966 he finally presented his first major solo exhibition at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.

From then on he became a recognized artist, of whom in 1977 the Pompidou showed another record, with a compilation of his sketches, studies and drawings.

About those works, he declared then: "Between 1952 and 1959, drawing has served me as a battlefield for style."

In the mid-1970s he began to collaborate with the Belgian art historian, sculptor and critic Coosje van Bruggen, his future partner, on large-scale projects for public spaces.

As an example, in Madrid he installed in 1986 in the Palacio de Cristal del Retiro a large 12 meter long knife that also represented a ship, a work that he had previously presented in Venice.

“I was only interested in exhibiting this boat, which is also a sculpture, in an interesting place in itself”, she then declared about his work in the Madrid park.

'Clothespin', one of Claes Oldenburg's signature works, displayed on a Philadelphia street in 2002. Dan Loh (AP)

In 1995, the New York Guggenheim offered him a great retrospective, with some 200 objects, among which a badminton feather about 15 meters high stood out.

Another of his most significant exhibitions came in 2001, at the Serralves Museum in Porto, and in 2006 in Turin.

The following year, between numerous commissions and international recognition, the couple ended up at the Miró Foundation, in Barcelona.

Regarding the couple's way of working, Van Bruggen said that this symbiosis was "a dialogue that advances like a game of table tennis, back and forth towards the final crystallization, first in a sketch, then in a study, a three-dimensional model or a dynamic configuration by computer, following a method that privileges sensations to analysis, unlike the totally rational approach of practical realization”.

In 2013,

the MoMA dedicated its great summer exhibition to him.

Today works by Oldenburg can be seen, in addition to New York and Chicago, in Las Vegas, Kassel, Rotterdam, Paris, Berlin, Milan and Barcelona.