Mistos (Match Cover), Barcelona | Widewalls

An artist who gained prominence for his large-scale installations in public space, and moreover for being affiliated with the Pop art movement, Claes Oldenburg has made a number of astounding sculptures which are indeed oversized replicas of everyday objects. Most of those works were realized in close collaboration with his spouse, art historian Coosje van Bruggen. The couple started working together during the late 1970s, meaning that they produced monumental sculptures over the course of three decades, until she passed away in 2009.

Namely, since the early 1980s, van Bruggen was active as an independent critic and curator; her texts were published in Artforum magazine from 1983 to 1988, and in between 1996 and 1997 she worked as a senior critic in the sculpture department at Yale University School of Art. Van Bruggen wrote several books and essays about the work of artists such as Gerhard Richter, John Baldessari, and Bruce Nauman.

We selected seven exceptional outdoor sculptures made by Oldenburg and van Bruggen which illustrate their mutual exchange and impeccable sense of public space, humor, and interpretation of the social context.

Featured image: Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen – Mistos (Match Cover), Barcelona, 1992. Image creative commons.