Since the early 1960s, Claes Oldenburg has been associated with the Pop art movement. He has made sculptures, collages, drawings and prints of familiar objects that are whimsical and insightful reflections on the culture of consumption. One of Oldenburg’s most well-known creations was ‘The Store,’ which he opened in an empty commercial space in New York’s Lower East Side in 1961. He displayed painted plaster and enamel replicas of the cheap goods found in neighborhood stores.
Oldenburg continued to introduce other unexpected elements in his works throughout the 1960s, playing with ideas of scale, material and context. He made his first multiples, limited edition sculptures produced in series, in 1964 when he moved to Venice, California. He viewed the multiple as the sculptor’s version of a print and appreciated the irony of mass-producing reproductions of mass-produced objects. In ‘Tilting Neon Cocktail’ (1983), Oldenburg transformed the familiar bar sign icon into a stainless steel sculpture on a plinth.