Soft Fur Good Humors, 1963.
Fake fur filled with kapok; wood painted with enamel
4 units, each 2 x 9-1/2 x 19 inches (5.1 x 24.1 x 48.2 cm)
Collection of Will and Anne Hokin
Since 1962, Oldenburg has been making soft sculpture based on commonobjects ranging from household fixtures (such as toilets, fans, and lightswitches) to foodstuffs and Manhattan maps. His later soft sculptures aresewn from vinyl or canvas and are stuffed with filler material to achievevarying degrees of flaccidity, his method of "modeling."
SoftPay-Telephone, 1963. "The main reason for making a soft version of a knownhard object may be (I think more and more it is) to dramatize or isolatethe condition of softness. And other conditions such as the response to"gravity"--this condition under which objects appear to exist, and we asobjects, as matter, appear to exist."
Vinyl filled with dacron andcanvas,
47 x 47 x 3-1/8 inches (119.4 x 119.4 x 9.1 cm.),
TheNelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri,
Gift of the ChapinFamily in memory of Susan Chapin Buckwalter, 65-29.
Thesesoft forms, which possess "many identities," exist in a state of constantpermutation, shifting in response to movement or the forces of gravity andcreating visual paradoxes as hard metamorphoses into soft. Oldenburg hasexplained, "I like to work in material that is organic-seeming and full ofsurprises, inventive all by itself." The contours of his soft sculptureshave erotic overtones as they swell and droop, suggesting the vulnerable,animate forms of the human body. Examples of Oldenburg's soft sculpturesappear throughout the exhibition.
Vinyl filed with kapok, mounted on paintedwood,
46-1/2 x 19 x 9 inches (118.2 x 48.3 x 22.8 cm.),
Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum, New York,
Gift of Ruth and Philip Zierler, inmemory of their dear departed son,
William S. Zierler,1980.
--Oldenburg, 1969
Giant BLT (Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato Sandwich), 1963.
Vinyl filed with kapok, and wood painted with acrylic,
32 x 39 x 29 inches (81.3 x 99.1 x 72.7 cm),
Collection of Maria and Conrad Janis, Beverly Hills.
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