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Chicago has a strange metaphysical elegance of death about it.

Claes Oldenburg

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Claes Oldenburg
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: January 28
Designer
Drawer
Graphic Artist
Painter
Performance Artist
Printmaker
Sculptor
Sthlm
Ḳlaʼes Oldenberg
Claes Thure Oldenburg
Elegance
Chicago
Strange
Cities
Death
Metaphysical

More quotes by Claes Oldenburg

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My rule was not to paint things as they were. I wasn't copying I was remaking them as my own.
Claes Oldenburg
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Because my work is naturally non-meaningful, the meaning found in it will remain doubtful and inconsistent - which is the way it should be. All that I care about is that, like any startling piece of nature, it should be capable of stimulating meaning.
Claes Oldenburg
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It was easy to get a job at the Cedar Bar because people came and went, but I didn't like the atmosphere. Instead, I got a job at Cooper Union Library. I stayed at Cooper Union for seven years it was my salvation. While I worked there, I also read books of every kind.
Claes Oldenburg
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There's always been a potential erotic possibility with objects.
Claes Oldenburg
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Ox-Bow was a very free place, very open. You could do whatever you wanted to do.
Claes Oldenburg
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I am for the art of underwear and the art of taxicabs. I am for the art of ice cream cones dropped on concrete.
Claes Oldenburg
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All the fun is locking horns with impossibilities.
Claes Oldenburg
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I knew I wasn't that good a writer, and all I could remember was that I could draw. I'm better at drawing than I am at writing.
Claes Oldenburg
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Art is a technique of communication. The image is the most complete technique of all communication.
Claes Oldenburg
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For a thorough use of ice cream cones, buy two eat one and drop the other.
Claes Oldenburg
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I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all.
Claes Oldenburg
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My work doesn't have the same rules as, say, Andy [Warhol]'s work. But it's gathered together for the simple reason that we all worked with the images and objects around us.
Claes Oldenburg
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Duchamp is known for calling a thing art, rather than making it. A lot of that is picked up in pop art, too.
Claes Oldenburg
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I was very happy to be living in New York at that time, more than in the present time. Now it's all commerce.
Claes Oldenburg
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In 1958 I finally found a large enough apartment on the Lower East Side, where I reverted to figure painting. I drew and painted quite a lot of figures and nudes. People would come and pose for me.
Claes Oldenburg
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Of course, the '60s was a study in decadence. Everything just got worse and worse, and at the end of the '60s, everything was so horrible that people were killing each other.
Claes Oldenburg
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Food is like clay you can sculpt with it. Also it has an odor, and you can eat it. I don't eat a lot of cake, but I do make cakes! And unlike the Campbell's Soup Cans, my food is a humanized form and scale.
Claes Oldenburg
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I went back to the Art Institute, then spent the summer at the Ox-Bow School in Saugatuck, Michigan. That's what really awakened me. I made a lot of oil paintings and my first performance.
Claes Oldenburg
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My mother warned me to avoid things colored red.
Claes Oldenburg
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I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.
Claes Oldenburg