Claes Oldenburg, born in Sweden in 1929, was eager to begin his art career by moving to NYC in the mid-1950s while he was 27 years old. While he began his artistic endeavor as a painter, he quickly realized that in order to make fame last you need to be involved in sculpture... his words.

Oldenburg's art installations are provocative, audacious, norm-challenging, and thoughtful enough that pushed him to be recognized as one of the most influential artists of the 20th Century. His first installation, The Street in 1960, involved scenes of urban life, mirroring the scenes they portrayed. By using found materials such as old, ripped cardboard, scavenged newspapers, black poster paint, etc., he created scenes that depicted "street life", full of imagery that exposed the rough and crude scenes as a "mixture of things as they are and things as they are imagined to be" in a very abstracted way. In 1961 he turned to The Store with his installation focusing on brightly vibrant food sculptures, clothing, and everyday items. The items in the display were even open to the public and on sale during certain hours of the day (the other hours Oldenburg used as a studio), and the items were as unruly, lumpy, crooked, and as misshapen as the location, which was the Ray Gun Manufacturing Company. “I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself,” said Oldenburg, “that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.”   Museum of Modern Art (MOMA)

Baked Potato