Claes Oldenburg: Multiples: The first London exhibition of Oldenburg's Multiples

8 May - 29 June 2025

Overview

Because my work is naturally non-meaningful, the meaning found in it will remain doubtful and inconsistent - which is the way it should be. All that I care about is that, like any startling piece of nature, it should be capable of stimulating meaning.

The first London exhibition of Oldenburg's Multiples
opens at Shapero Modern on Bond Street

Shapero Modern is pleased to announce the opening of an exhibition of Claes Oldenburg's Multiples - one of the most complete exhibitions of his famous sculptural works of everyday objects. The show opens at Shapero Modern at 94 New Bond Street on Thursday, 8th May 2025 and will include such iconic works as Tilting Neon Cocktail and Profile Airflow, but also other works by the artist such as Fagend Study. It runs until 29th June and will be sold as a whole collection, but duplicates are also available for sale separately.

Claes Oldenburg (Stockholm 1929 - New York City 2022), the Swedish-American artist defied the rules of Abstract Expressionism and was one of the most influential artists since the 1950s. After initially making sculptures and sewn creations from what he found on the streets of New York, he became famous for his ordinary objects turned into colossal sculptures on public view. He denied that his huge sculptures of everyday objects were Pop Art, but his early work of the 1960s was
certainly seen as ground-breaking.

From the collection of his older brother Richard E. Oldenburg, director of MOMA from 1972-1995, comes Profile Airflow - Test Mold, Front End, a cast-polyurethane relief over screen printed Plexiglass in a welded aluminium frame, from 1972. It is signed and
numbered, artist's proof aside from the edition of 50.

Oldenburg commented on this work: “The Profile Airflow multiple, like the Tea Bag, is a relief superimposed over an image, though this time the relief is larger and far more complex in detail and fabrication. The Chrysler Airflow, which appeared in 1937, was the first “streamlined” car. It became the subject for many of my soft sculptures shown at the Sidney Janis Gallery in March 1966. In the course of the project I visited Carl Breer, the inventor of the Chrysler Airflow, in Detroit and studied a mammoth specimen of the automobile that he owned. I dissected the car into parts that would serve as sculptures – the radiator, the engine, the muffler, the dashboard, the tires, the doors, taillight, mudguards, etc. – and established three scales. The Airflow project at Gemini G.E.L., made three years later, was a kind of reprise in the media of reproduction, set in the industrial paradise of Los Angeles where, I discovered, Breer had been born. Two days after I arrived in Los Angeles to work at Gemini G.E.L. for the first time, I was presented with an actual Airflow, which happened to be maroon just like a toy Airflow I had owned as a child and, in addition, had the distinction of being the first automobile to have been driven over the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. This car was then intensively photographed in preparation for what was to be a portfolio of prints and reliefs on different areas of the car, together with a separate Profile edition."

Oldenburg envisioned choreography for an opulent table setting with sixty-five twirling cocktails, but this never materialized. Instead he created Tilting Neon Cocktail, a stainless steel, cast aluminium, acrylic paint and Plexiglass sculpture in 1983. It was inspired by his time in San Francisco in 1954 where he noticed that neon signs of that shape identified cocktail bars.

One of his most famous works is Fagend Study, although not part of the Multiples group it was conceived in 1968, but cast in 1976. Claes Oldenburg revisited the subject of the “fagend” repeatedly throughout his career, with it first appearing in his work from the 1960s. Oldenburg said he got the idea for the Fagend Study sculpture from seeing an anti-smoking poster in London. The sculpture is cast aluminium, hand painted with enamel and carries a price tag of £80,000.