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 common objects ranging from household fixtures (such as toilets, fans, and light switches) to foodstuffs and Manhattan maps. His later soft sculptures are sewn from vinyl or canvas and are stuffed with filler material to achieve varying degrees of flaccidity, his method of "modeling."
Soft Switches, 1964,.
Vinyl filled with dacron and
canvas,
47 x 47 x 3-1/8 inches (119.4 x 119.4 x 9.1 cm.),
The
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri,
Gift of the Chapin
Family in memory of Susan Chapin Buckwalter, 65-29.
These
soft forms, which possess "many identities," exist in a state of constant
permutation, shifting in response to movement or the forces of gravity and
creating visual paradoxes as hard metamorphoses into soft. Oldenburg has
explained, "I like to work in material that is organic-seeming and full of
surprises, inventive all by itself." The contours of his soft sculptures
have erotic overtones as they swell and droop, suggesting the vulnerable,
animate forms of the human body. Examples of Oldenburg's soft sculptures
appear throughout the exhibition.
Soft
Pay-Telephone, 1963.
Vinyl filed with kapok, mounted on painted
wood,
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, in
memory of their dear departed son,
William S. Zierler,
1980.
"The main reason for making a soft version of a known hard object may be (I think more and more it is) to dramatize or isolate the condition of softness. And other conditions such as the response to "gravity"--this condition under which objects appear to exist, and we as objects, as matter, appear to exist."
--Oldenburg, 1969
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