Claes Oldenburg + Coosje van Bruggen: Thinking Big

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 — despite their inanimate subject matter — profoundly human, their projects collapse the boundary between public and private and radically reinvent the tradition of the monument.

This presentation of works from the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection — part of Reimagined: The Fisher Collection at 10 — features models for four of their most iconic projects, including San Francisco’s own beloved Cupid’s Span (2002). It also includes related sculptures by the artists from the late 1980s and early 1990s, and several works by Oldenburg from the early 1970s that anticipate features of their large-scale projects.