Claes Oldenburg Quotes & Sayings

“My single-minded aim is to give existence to fantasy.”

“I am for the art of underwear and the art of taxicabs. I am for the art of ice cream cones dropped on concrete.”

“Chicago has a strange metaphysical elegance of death about it.”

“'Clothespin' was the first city monument on a large scale that could compete with the architecture around it.”

“I think of a monument as being symbolic and for the people and therefore rhetorical, not honest, not personal.”

“I like to treat paint as material - to daub it, drop it, let it slide. There was Action Painting, but I also compare it to paint effects found on the streets. This approach is superimposed on a sculptural surface that is also 'painterly.'”

“If you really want to be an artist, you search yourself, and you find a lot of it comes from earlier times. I have pretty much built the work around my experiences. When I've moved from one place to another, the work has changed.”

“My struggle has been to return painting to the tangible object, which is like returning the personality to touching and feeling the world around it, to offset the tendency to vagueness and abstraction. To remind people of practical activity, to suggest the sense and not to escape from the senses.”

“A life cycle can be imposed on an object. An object can be very energetic and active, and then it has a dying phase and a phase of decomposition.”