MUNICH.- Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen's spectacular sculpture “Leaning Fork with Meatball & Spaghetti III” is undoubtedly one of the highlights of Ketterer Kunst's June 6 – 7 auction. This humorous yet profound contribution to Pop Art challenges scale, material, and perception. The work is one of the artist's rare “Giant Objects,” and only a few are still available on the international market.


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No one mastered the interplay of proportion, materiality, realism, and absurdity better than Claes Oldenburg, a native Swede but thoroughbred American. The last great pop artist passed away in 2022. He was one of the few who turned to sculpture in a stroke of genius, simplifying it to its essence. After studying at Yale and the Art Institute of Chicago, he settled in New York in the second half of the 1950s, witnessing the decline of the once spectacular Abstract Expressionism.

His colleagues' rather elitist self-centeredness and exaggerated introspection, accompanied by overly dramatic gestures, thoroughly annoyed him. He was interested in artistic practice's performative, conceptual, and spatial aspects. He transformed everyday objects into “soft sculptures,” creating stuffed hamburgers and plaster casts of kitchen utensils and tools. He quickly expanded the dimensions of this world of commodities into inconceivable realms. The commonplace became spectacular; consumerism overshadowed everything. His first monumental outdoor artwork was a huge tank track with a seven-meter-high lipstick perched on top. That was in 1969, and it was a fierce statement against the Vietnam War. Make love, not war!

Oldenburg repeatedly engaged in politics with wit tinged with anger. Small things found themselves in unfamiliar, incongruous surroundings. This was unsettling and, despite all the cheerfulness, anything but comforting. Instead, he questioned our relationship to consumerism and mindlessness in a seemingly casual yet socio-critical way, knowing we were reluctant to revise or reevaluate our rigid perceptions and assessments of triviality and art.

Pace (then Pace Wildenstein) has represented Oldenburg since 1960. He started with playful objects – kitchen appliances, telephones, sinks, toilets, etc.- in soft vinyl, which he showcased to great acclaim in his first gallery exhibition, “The Store,” in Manhattan in 1961. His last work, “Dropped Bouquet,” conceived jointly with his wife Coosie van Bruggen in 2009, is a wonderfully cheerful bouquet of colorful flowers that appears to have been carelessly dropped.

His work “Knife Ship,” a large Swiss folding knife that sailed through the Grand Canal in 2008 with its blades extended and a corkscrew motor caused quite a stir at the time. Once again, the not-so-impossible dual absurdity of object and environment had been proven. Venice, however, went a bit crazy at the time.

After initial, almost unanimous rejection in 1988, the steel sculpture “Spoonbridge and Cherry” in Minneapolis has become an all-time favorite with the public. A giant spoon with a bright red cherry resting in its bowl spans a pond, water bubbling from the cherry's stem and glistening on its plump surface in the sunlight. What is it all about? Pleasure, food, and the themes of modern life are stripped of their self evidence by Oldenburg as soon as the scale is no longer correct and the location becomes an incongruity.

Oldenburg in New York: “Leaning Fork with Meatball & Spaghetti III” as a humorous take on the multicultural metropolis

The same applies to our “Leaning Fork with Meatball & Spaghetti III.” A “Giant Object” made of cast aluminum with polyurethane, which once again defies our viewing habits, is one of three slightly modified copies. The giant fork leans against the wall, casually, very American, with a meatball wrapped in spaghetti on the prongs, very Italian. However, spaghetti and meatballs only became established in America among Italian immigrant families and were, willy-nilly, declared a typical Italian dish, supposedly cooked in the kitchens of Naples since the dawn of time. A delicious mistake, an incredible deception, a fake Italianità that, as so often, we are only too willing to fall for. With his large-scale, highly poetic works, the artist challenges our perceptions in many ways. Cheerful and deadly serious, each of his works is a lively wake- up call. “I am in favor of art that is political, erotic, and mystical,” he once said, “art that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.”

Oldenburg's captivating “Giant Objects” are rare on the international auction market. A copy of the almost six-meter-high work “Typewriter Eraser, Scale X” from 1998/99 was auctioned in New York for the latest record price of US$7 million.

The work is offered in the Evening Sale in Munich on Friday, June 6, 2005.


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