Symbolic Self-Portrait with Equals, 1969.
Pencil, crayon, spray enamel, watercolor, and collage on paper,
11 x 8-1/4 inches (27.9 x 21 cm),
Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

The son of a Swedish diplomat, Oldenburg was born in 1929 in Stockholm. When he was an infant, the family moved to the United States, settling for a time inNew York but eventually moving to Chicago.

After attending Yale University from1946 to 1950, Oldenburg returned to Chicago, where he worked as a cub newspaperreporter and took courses at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1956, he moved toNew York City, where he came into contact with Jim Dine, Red Grooms, AllanKaprow, and others, whose theatrically based art posed an alternative to theprevailing influence of Abstract Expressionist painting.

The radicalexperiments of these artists involved the creation of environments for theirperformances, called Happenings, which were partly scripted, partly spontaneoustheatrical events that, Oldenburg says, broke down "barriers between the artsand something close to an actual experience."

"Theater is the most powerful art form there is because it is the mostinvolving.... I no longer see the distinction between theater and visualarts very clearly... distinctions I suppose are a civilized disease."

--Oldenburg, 1962

Oldenburg's practice of situating objects within an environment, sometimes created as a context for theater, has remained to the present day a mainstay of his artisticapproach.

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