Giant Outdoor Hamburger

Fabric, cardboard, foam.

The Ontario Art Gallery, Toronto, Canada.

The artist’s early works were created under the influence of the famous “finished things” by Marcel Duchamp and the aesthetics of Pop art. The most ordinary objects that a person sees and uses most often every day became an object of his art. Claes Oldenburg focused his attention on food, making a vast outdoor hamburger, the same piece of cake and ice cream from fabric and improvised things. The viewers admired the disproportional sizes and originality of these unusual “anti-sculptures” (as the author called them). Thanks to these “soft” works, the artist’s name quickly became famous among connoisseurs of contemporary art in New York in the 1960s.