Claes Oldenburg is an American Pop-art sculptor, best known for his public art installations typically featuring large replicas of everyday objects. From cigarette butts to colossal ice cream cones, he transforms the expectations of sculpture and its subject matter by making large scaled soft works imitating the familiar and banal, thus creating a new unconventional relationship between viewer and object. He realized his first outdoor public monument in 1967; Placid Civic Monument took the form of a Conceptual performance/action behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, with a crew of gravediggers digging a 6-by-3-foot rectangular hole in the ground.

Oldenburg has had several retrospectives in major museums, including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1969), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1995), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2002).

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