The European Desktop
Installation view, Ivorypress Art + Books, Madrid, Spain, 2010 (Photo: Attilio Maranzano)
© Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, New York.
Claes Oldenburg / Coosje van Bruggen at Pace Gallery The Pace Gallery presents the first major New York gallery exhibition in seven years of works by Claes Oldenburg and his long-time partner Coosje van Bruggen(1942–2009): ‘Theater and Installation 1985–1990: Il Corso del Coltello and The European Desktop’.
April 27 through June 23, 2012
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Source: Pace Gallery
The two-part exhibition will feature enlarged costumes and original props from Il Corso del Coltello (acollaborative work with architect Frank Gehry, produced and curated by Germano Celant, performed inVenice in 1985) and The European Desktop, 1990, Oldenburg/van Bruggen’s last installation piece. This willbe the first public presentation of The European Desktop in the United States. The sculptures of Il Corso delColtello were last exhibited in Barcelona in 2007 and have not been seen in the United States since 1995.
Inspiration for The European Desktop stems from a headline in the International Herald Tribune in 1990 thatcaptured van Bruggen’s attention: “Undoing Yalta: 45 Years Later, a New Europe.” Designed as a totalenvironment, The European Desktop addresses the headline’s unfounded optimism by immersing viewers in aravaged landscape of intellectual chaos: a monumental collapsed European postal scale, stamp blotters, a writingquill, an exploding ink bottle, and a shattered desk pad will be strewn across the gallery, appearing as though theyhave fallen from the sky. Two texts written in van Bruggen’s hand are cut from aluminum and attached to theblotters: one from the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, written in reverse which was his habit; the other, a poem toFrédéric Chopin composed by van Bruggen.
This exhibition coincides with Claes Oldenburg: The Sixties, the largest exhibition of the artist’s ground-breakingworks of the 1960s organized to date, on view at Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (MUMOK),Vienna through May 28. The exhibition is the first installment of a five-museum tour, which also includes theMuseum Ludwig, Cologne; Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao; The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the WalkerArt Center, Minneapolis. The retrospective features Oldenburg’s iconic early installations such as The Street andThe Store, in addition to his original designs for colossal monuments for public spaces and the Mouse Museum—aminiature, walk-in museum in the form of a Geometric Mouse, filled with nearly 400 souvenirs, kitsch objects, andstudio models. Oldenburg’s pivotal role in performance art in the early 1960s was recently explored inHappenings: New York, 1958– 1963 at Pace (February 10 through March 17, 2012).
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