Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen at Lever House

CLAES OLDENBURG & COOSJE VAN BRUGGEN

Architect’s Handkerchief, 1999, Fiber-reinforced plastic painted with polyester gelcoat, 12 ft 5 in x 12 ft 3 in x 7 ft 5 in (378.5 x 373.4 x 226.1 cm)

Plantoir, Red (Mid-Scale), 2001-2021, Painted cast aluminum and stainless steel, and polyurethane foam, 185 x 42 1/2 x 34 1/4 in (469.9 x 108 x 87 cm)

© Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Courtesy of the Estate of Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Timothy Schenck

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Brookfield Properties and WatermanClark, in conjunction with Paula Cooper Gallery, are thrilled to present Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen at Lever House. The first significant presentation of the artists’ work since Oldenburg’s death in 2022, the exhibition will feature important and career-spanning artworks installed throughout the landmark building and its outdoor spaces. The exhibition will be free and open to the public from November 18, 2024, through November 30, 2025.

The works on view will include two of the giant works for which Oldenburg and van Bruggen were so widely known, installed on the outdoor plazas and highly visible from Park Avenue, as well as plaster sculptures first shown in the East Village in 1961, iconic fabric “soft” sculptures from the 1960s and 1970s, and drawings for proposed colossal monuments (such as a Good Humor bar to replace the Pan Am Building).

“We are delighted to honor the legacy of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen with this remarkable exhibition at the newly restored Lever House,” said Callie Haines, Executive Vice President, Brookfield Properties. “We remain steadfast in our commitment to presenting world-class works of public art across our properties and are especially lucky to be working with Paula Cooper Gallery and Jacob King on this show. Itself a Modernist masterpiece, Lever House is the perfect backdrop for these iconic sculptures.”

A particular focus of the presentation will be Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s sculptures that depict consumer products, such as toothpaste and lipstick, as Lever House was built in 1952 as the headquarters for Lever Brothers, a preeminent manufacturer of soap and consumer goods. These sculptures will be displayed in the original and newly restored lobby vitrines, which Lever Brothers used to showcase their products.

Other works in the presentation touch on midcentury architecture, such as Architect’s Handkerchief, a twelve-foot tall depiction of Mies Van Der Rohe’s characteristic pocket handkerchief, which will blow like a flame towards the Seagram Building across Park Avenue, and Plantoir, a 16-foot tall sculpture of a garden trowel, to be installed in the central courtyard adjacent to Lever House’s iconic indoor-outdoor planter (one

of the building’s many firsts, and an innovation that exemplifies the building’s radical integration of indoor and outdoor space.)

“The connections between Oldenburg’s early work and Lever House are just remarkable,” explained King, who organized the presentation. “Oldenburg’s works from the 1960s, in which everyday objects such as hamburgers, typewriters, pastries, and sneakers rendered in lowly materials like plaster and fabric, both reflected and commented upon the exploding consumer culture of postwar America: a society of fast cars,

tall buildings, and cavernous supermarkets. Lever House, meanwhile, defined what offices would look like in this era: its open floorplans and glass curtain walls reflected the optimism and prosperity of America in the 1950s, while its lobby doubled as a showroom for Lever Brothers’ soaps and household products.”

“We were honored when Jacob King approached us with the idea of showing the full breadth of Claes and

Coosje’s practice at Lever House—a building that was originally designed to exhibit artworks. Amazingly, unlike in other major cities in the U.S. and abroad, New York has no large-scale sculptures by Claes and Coosje on permanent view, so it is especially exciting that two monumental outdoor works are part of the exhibition,” said Paula Cooper.

Designed by architects Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), Lever House was built in 1952 as the headquarters of soap manufacturer Lever Brothers. Its radical design and glass curtain wall both indelibly changed the character of Park Avenue and influenced the way countless office buildings have been constructed across the globe. In 1982, Lever House was designated as New York City’s first modernist landmark.

In early 2022, Brookfield Properties and WatermanClark launched a complete restoration of the 21-story, 260,000-square-foot tower, ground-level public plaza, lobby, and 15,000-square-foot outdoor terrace spaces as well as the third-floor Lever Club—an upscale lounge, restaurant, conference venue, and hospitality suite designed by Marmol Radziner.

“Since we took ownership, the art program at Lever House has been pivotal in attracting some of the world’s most dynamic and significant business leaders, reasserting Lever House as the premier office destination on Park Avenue,” said Alan Bernstein, Managing Director at WatermanClark. “This exhibition of the works of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen continues our commitment to blending art with commerce, providing an enriching environment for tenants and the public alike.”

This is the second presentation of public art at Lever House since the restoration, and it follows a year-long presentation of Ellsworth Kelly sculptures.

About Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen

Claes Oldenburg was among the most influential and beloved sculptors of the twentieth century, an artist whose audacious, witty, and profound depictions of everyday objects changed the way we understand and see art in the world.

Born in 1929 in Stockholm, Sweden, Oldenburg grew up in Chicago. He moved to New York City in 1956, where he soon became a prominent figure amongst a group of downtown artists engaged in Happenings and Performance art. In 1961, he opened The Store in his East Village studio, where he recreated the environment and inventories of regular neighborhood shops—except all the goods on offer were made from plaster. These led to his legendary “soft sculptures”: everyday objects rendered in fabric or vinyl.

Oldenburg 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 in New York with a crew of gravediggers digging a 6-by-3-foot rectangular hole in the ground. Beginning in the mid-1960s, he proposed colossal art projects for several cities, and by 1969, his first such work to be realized, Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, was installed at Yale University. Most of his subsequent large-scale sculptures were made with the collaboration of Coosje van Bruggen, a curator and art historian born in 1942 in The Netherlands, whom he married in 1977. These include iconic public works in cities around the world such as Clothespin in Philadelphia (1976), Spoonbridge and Cherry in Minneapolis (1988), Match Cover in Barcelona (1991), Shuttlecock in Kansas City (1994), and Saw, Sawing in Tokyo (1996).