Claes Oldenburg: Multiples

Date: 15 May 2025

Karen Jones

First exhibition of his Multiples in London opens at Shapero Modern on Bond Street.

Shapero Modern is pleased to announce the opening of an exhibition of
Claes Oldenburg’s Multiples – believed to be 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.”
Claes 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. This is one of the most likely opportunities to buy an almost complete group of his Multiple works.
For more press information, images or to arrange an interview, please
contact Silke Lohmann: silke@exclamationpr.co.uk or 07932 618754.

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