Claes & Coosje

Pace Gallery is honored to present an exhibition celebrating the collaborative spirit that animated Claes Oldenburg and the late Coosje van Bruggen’s artistic achievements and romantic partnership. Over the course of three decades, Oldenburg and van Bruggen created some of the most famous landmarks in urban and civic spaces around the world. Bringing together a selection of seminal works in sculpture spanning the full arc of their shared history—from early collaborations in the 1980s to their final works of the late 2000s—the exhibition pays homage to one of the 20th century’s most influential artistic duos, highlighting in particular van Bruggen’s vital yet underrecognized role in their collective oeuvre. Claes & Coosje: A Duet sheds new light on the philosophical, aesthetic, and artistic dialogue between these two artists and the indispensable role it played on their collective creative output.

Among the best-known artist-couples of the post-1960s era, Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s partnership was, from the beginning, a conspiracy between artist and art historian. They met in 1971, when van Bruggen was a young curator at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and they married six years later. During the 1980s, van Bruggen soon transformed from interlocutor into full-fledged artistic collaborator and artist in her own right. From the 1970s onward, Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s ongoing debates and conversations—first around major sculptural commissions and later in their collaborative studio practice—reflected a profound intellectual exchange shaped by the sensibility of a sculptor, on the one hand, and that of a writer, on the other. The result was one of the most fruitful, impactful, and sometimes controversial collaborations in 20th century art. Today, Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s large-scale projects remain some of the most recognizable and beloved public artworks in the world.