Claes Oldenburg

Curated by Pace CEO Marc Glimcher and Maartje Oldenburg—daughter of Oldenburg and his wife and longtime collaborator Coosje van Bruggen, and head of the artists’ estates—the exhibition is organized as part of the gallery’s 65th anniversary year celebration. It will also be Pace’s first major presentation of Oldenburg’s work since the gallery announced its global representation of the Oldenburg estate, the van Bruggen estate, and the Oldenburg and van Bruggen estate, continuing its commitment to sharing the intertwining legacies and individual achievements of the two artists with its global audience.

The Japanese title of the gallery’s presentation is いろいろ (“Iroiro”), which roughly translates to “various,” “variety,” or “miscellany.” Suggesting a mixed-bag or a hodgepodge, “Iroiro” can also be written as 色々, which comprises a repetition of the Kanji character 色 (“Iro”). “Iro” literally means “color,” but it typically refers to the color or hue of things. It can also suggest an object’s general appearance, and even more metaphorically, can refer to the sensuality of a thing (as in the occasional English usage of the word “colorful”). “Iroiro” thus echoes Oldenburg’s almost passionate involvement with banal objects, the way he lovingly coaxed a vast array of ordinary, miscellaneous things from their humdrum existence in the normal course of life—the "this and that”—into subject-matter for serious artistic inquiry.

This exhibition in Tokyo will be the first major presentation of Oldenburg’s work in the Japanese capital since 1996. The artist’s only other solo show in the city took place in 1973 at Minami Gallery. Notably, he debuted his large-scale Giant Ice Bag (1970) sculpture, which is animated by mechanical and hydraulic components, in the US Pavilion at Expo 70 in Osaka. Since 1995, Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s large-scale sculpture Saw, Sawing has been on public view outside the Tokyo International Exhibition Center. Oldenburg’s sculptures Inverted Q (1977–88) and Tube Supported by Its Contents (1983) can be found in the collections of the Yokohama Museum of Art and the Utsunomiya Museum of Art, respectively.

Oldenburg—who presented his first solo exhibition with Pace in 1964—was a leading voice of the Pop Art movement who, over the course of more than six decades, redefined the history of art with his sculptures, drawings, and colossal public monuments that transform everyday objects into idiosyncratic entities. He rose to prominence in New York in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when he was among the artists staging Happenings—a hybrid art form incorporating installation, performance, and other mediums—on the city’s Lower East Side. Collaborative and ephemeral, these environments included The Street (1960) and The Store (1961)—his first solo presentation with Pace featured works from The Store. Following his work with props in these Happenings, Oldenburg began creating his iconic soft sculptures, which charted new frontiers in the medium, upending its traditional contents, forms, and materials.

Oldenburg and Pace’s Founder and Chairman Arne Glimcher maintained a friendship for 60 years, working closely from the early years of the artist’s career up until his death in 2022. Since the 1960s, Pace has presented Oldenburg’s work in some 30 exhibitions and produced seven catalogues dedicated to his practice. The gallery also supported Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s creation of the large-scale sculptures Typewriter Eraser, Scale X (1998-99), which is part of the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Balzac Pétanque (2002), which is in the collection of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and Floating Peel (2002) at the Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, among many other projects.

Among the works in the gallery’s upcoming Tokyo show will be some 60 multiples of Oldenburg’s painted cardboard sculpture N.Y.C. Pretzel (1994)—these works will be presented in a vending machine vitrine near the entrance of the gallery space. Other multiples in the exhibition include the artist’s cast plaster Wedding Souvenir (1966), his painted aluminium and brass Profiterole (1989–90), and his sewn canvas Mouse Bags (2007–17), all of which speak to his engagement with the quotidian, from the food we eat to pop cultural icons like Mickey Mouse.

In the way of larger-scale sculpture, This & That will feature Tied Trumpet (2004), a knotted bright yellow trumpet rendered in aluminum, plastic tubing, canvas, felt, and foam, and Miniature Soft Drum Set (1969), a set of nine sewn screen-printed elements on canvas. Another highlight will be Knife Ship 1:12 (2008), an aluminum and mahogany wood reprisal of the monumental Knife Ship that Oldenburg and van Bruggen presented as part of their legendary 1985 performance Il Corso del Coltello (The Corse of the Knife) in Venice, Italy—this storied, site-specific project, realized by the artists in collaboration with curator Germano Celant and architect Frank Gehry, centered around a boat in the shape of a Swiss-army knife, which was floated down the city’s canals.

A 1976 screenprint of the Knife Ship superimposed onto the image of the Guggenheim Museum in New York—an artwork that predates the performance—will also be included in This & That. Other prints on view at Pace in Tokyo will be Alphabet in Form of a Good Humor Bar (1970), which renders the alphabet in the shape of an ice cream bar; The Letter Q as Beach House, with Sailboat (1972), where Oldenburg imagines the letter ‘Q’ as a towering waterfront home; and the artist’s Apple Core prints, each representative of one of the four seasons, from 1990.

Through his iterative and elastic process of translating imagery from one medium to another—and suggesting innumerable possible transformations as part of that process—Oldenburg expanded the possibilities of art by inviting the viewer to look again. Taken together, the works in this exhibition reflect his uncanny ability to render the familiar strange, and to imbue magic and wonder into the most mundane of subject matter.