Claes Oldenburg, veteran of Pop Art known for his whimsical oversized sculptures of everyday objects – obituary

Claes Oldenburg, who has died aged 93, was the Swedish-American sculptor who, while working within the broad traditions of Pop Art, developed his own style of giant sculpture.

Using unexpected materials and an outsized scale so as to subvert the character and intensify the presence of the sculpture, Oldenburg celebrated and satirised American culture and consumerism. His subject matter was the overfamiliar – and hence unregarded – paraphernalia of everyday life, such as cheeseburgers and penknives, cutlery and shuttlecocks.

Having risen to prominence alongside Pop Art, itself a reaction to the elevated abstraction of artists such as Barnett Newman, Oldenburg pursued his singular vision. Although he was criticised for the unvarying nature of his development, this overlooks the wit and sophistication of his work and the originality of his ultimate move outside the confines of the gallery and into the urban arena, where his vast, colourful sculptures brightened many a neutral space and drab cityscape.

Working in conjunction with his second wife, the writer Coosje van Bruggen, Oldenburg finally realised the ideal he had stated in his 1961 Whitmanesque manifesto: “I am for an art that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum... an art that embroils itself in everyday crap... that is as heavy and coarse and blunt and stupid as life itself.”

Claes Thure Oldenburg was born in Stockholm on January 28 1929. His diplomat father was posted to New York and then, after a brief sojourn in Oslo, the family moved to Chicago where Claes was educated at the Chicago Latin School. He studied Drama and English Literature at Yale and became interested in art after attending a watercolour summer school at the University of Wisconsin.

After a spell as a crime reporter for the Chicago News Bureau, he enrolled at the Chicago Institute of Art. Having dropped out after two years in 1954, he undertook a variety of odd jobs ranging from dishwashing to drawing insects for the advertising arm of an insecticide company, painting in his spare time. Although he exhibited locally, his art did not progress until he moved to New York.

There, inspired by the bohemian atmosphere of the East Village, he began exhibiting papier-mâché sculptures, wood and newspaper constructions alongside his poetry in the alternative spaces that were springing up across lower Manhattan. In 1960 The Ray Gun Show introduced his burgeoning interest in the detritus of city life, the abandoned, charred and discredited items that he formalised into constructions under the generic title “The Street”.

In tandem with his sculpture, Oldenburg had developed an instinct for the theatre, which he saw as New York’s primary artistic activity. From 1960 onwards he staged “happenings” – theatrical events based on litter, street art and improvisation – which he opaquely characterised as “fragments of action immobilised by instantaneous illuminations”. The props for these shows were originally cardboard and newspaper, but later he used stuffed fabrics, which led in turn to his first “soft” sculptures.

Having relocated his studio to East Second Street, he opened “The Store”, a grotto-like room filled with his sculptures and drawings depicting the cheap items he saw in the windows of dime stores. Naming the shop The Ray Gun Manufacturing Co, Oldenburg effectively offered a performance art show in which he was designer, manufacturer, salesman and critic.

In the same space, “Ray Gun Theater” presented happenings which helped to break down the barrier between artist and public.

Throughout the early Sixties he developed his soft sculptures. Using stuffed vinyl, foam and other fabrics, he created pieces such as “Giant BLT”, in which he presented familiar objects in unexpected materials. His work became part of the Pop Art movement – a showcase for artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol – which he defined as “popular, transient, low-cost, mass-produced, sexy, witty and youthful”.

Although Pop Art had its detractors, who considered it simply undeveloped multiples of a single idea, most critics considered the Pop Artists to be making serious and often witty statements about machine-age modernity and the growth of advertising that might be understood by the man in the street.

In 1963 Oldenburg visited Los Angeles where, like David Hockney, he became fascinated by the cool, linear minimalism of urban interiors. Forsaking his soft sculptures he created “Bedroom Ensemble”, in which, working with a team of technicians, he created an entire bedroom of hard rhomboid furniture based upon the simplicity of the Californian motel.

After representing the United States at the 1964 Venice Biennale, Oldenburg lived briefly in Paris before returning to New York. He worked on further ideas of the home, based on the Californian linear ideal, in addition to plaster-cast food, and soft sculptures of collapsing toilets and various parts of the Chrysler Airflow, a car which had fascinated him since childhood.

Increasingly Oldenburg was becoming preoccupied with the formal problems of scale. In 1965 he made initial drawings of colossal monuments that could be placed in the public arena. In the same way “The Store” had broken down the barriers erected by a museum between the artist and the public, so these exterior monuments – a giant banana in Times Square, a vast teddy bear in Central Park – were intended for the benefit of everybody, anti-elitism being a founding principle of Pop Art.

While designing similar proposals for London, Oldenburg continued to sculpt in canvas, vinyl, polyurethane and wood. He concentrated on industrial objects that were becoming obsolete in the technological age. “Giant Soft Fan”, a 10ft invertebrate, exudes its own obsolescence. Oldenburg commented: “an electric fan has more form than a television... as things get smaller and more refined they lose their particular existence as objects... I was creating a cemetery of industrial objects.”

In 1967 Oldenburg became artist-in-residence at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, where he completed one of his most famous works “The Giant Soft Drum Set”. The same year he controversially dug a hole in Central Park as part of the “Sculpture in the Environment” exhibition.

Having attended the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968 he contributed an enormous fireplug to the “Richard J Daley” exhibition, which was organised to protest against the violent suppression of the peaceful marches that had attended the convention.

In the Seventies, with his fame increasing and retrospectives of his work in America and Europe, Oldenburg increasingly divided his work between large-scale outdoor collaborative and technologically innovative commissions, and private pursuits of drawing and printmaking.

His first monument was “Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks” (1969), commissioned by the graduates of Yale in protest against the Vietnam war. It consisted of a lifesize model of a tank with a tube of lipstick elevated from the gun turret. Made from steel, aluminium and wood and painted in enamel, the sculpture combines, in a typically Oldenburgian manner, humour, serious social comment and an underlying eroticism. “It is hard to imagine art without some sexual charge,” he said, and in his choice and often suggestive transformation of materials – vinyl, plastic, latex for example – he was forever alive to erotic possibility.

Throughout the Seventies he was receiving outdoor commissions from galleries and far-sighted bureaucrats. A “Giant Three-Way Plug” was installed in the grounds of the Allen Memorial Art Museum in Ohio and a 41ft blue steel trowel – “like the sword of Excalibur” – was placed in the sculpture garden at Otterlo in the Netherlands.

These sculptures confronted the orthodoxies of the Lilliputian viewer, their height, mass and surreal humour rendering the familiar strange and the transient permanent. At last Oldenburg had found a medium through which he could achieve his ambition to create an art that was “to be out there in life, to be accessible”.

After he married Coosje van Bruggen in 1977, she became his official collaborator on all the major projects he undertook over the next two decades. She brought a fresh impetus to his work, displaying an empathy towards surroundings and a conceptual dimension that enhanced Oldenburg’s aesthetic sensibility.

Together they devised and executed his large outdoor commissions, lectured both in the US and abroad, and in 1985 organised the collaboration in Venice of Il Corso del Coltello (“The Course of the Knife”), which climaxed in a steel-and-wood sculpted boat in the shape of a Swiss army knife floating along the canal of the Arsenale.

In the final analysis, and in spite of the major retrospectives he was accorded, Oldenburg’s oeuvre lacks sufficient variety of ideas for him to be considered an artist of the highest importance. Nevertheless, his role in taking sculpture away from the rarefied atmosphere of the museum and on to the street should not be underestimated. For Oldenburg, the sight of a pedestrian allowing himself a wry grin as he passed a 68ft red and yellow box of matches on the outskirts of Barcelona was its own reward.

Claes Oldenburg married, in 1960, Patty Mucha, an artist who became his first collaborator; the marriage was dissolved in 1970. He married secondly, in 1977, the Dutch curator and writer Coosje van Bruggen; she died in 2009. He is survived by a son and a daughter.

Claes Oldenburg, born January 28 1929, died July 18 2022