Claes Oldenburg + Coosje van Bruggen: Thinking Big

Ongoing
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

For over three decades, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen made the everyday unfamiliar by transforming common, often domestic, objects—a clothespin, a flashlight, an ice cream cone, a box of matches—into giant urban sculptures. Between 1976 and 2009, the husband-and-wife team created more than 40 “Large-Scale Projects” in cities around the world. Playful and profoundly human, their projects collapse the boundary between public and private and radically reinvent the tradition of the monument.

The presentation at SFMoMA features models for four of their most iconic projects, including San Francisco’s Cupid’s Span (2002).