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With his saggy hamburgers, colossal clothespins and giant three-way plugs, Claes Oldenburg has been the reigning king of Pop sculpture since the early s, back when New York was still truly gritty. In he rented a storefront, called it The Store , and stocked it with stuffed, crudely-painted forms resembling diner food, cheap clothing, and other mass-manufactured items that stupefied an audience accustomed to the austere, non-representational forms in Abstract Expressionist sculpture.

These so-called "soft-sculptures" are now hailed as the first sculptural expressions in Pop art. While his work has continued to grow in scale and ambition, his focus has remained steadfast: everyday items are presented on a magnified scale that reverses the traditional relationship between viewer and object.

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Oldenburg shrinks the spectator into a bite-sized morsel that might be devoured along with a giant piece of cake, or crushed by an enormous ice pack. His work shows us just how small we are, and serves as a vehicle for his smart, witty, critical, and often wickedly funny insights on American culture over the past half-century.

Saying "Everything I do is completely original - I made it up when I was a kid," Oldenburg's pioneering work made monumental sculptures of badminton shuttlecocks and ice cream cones. By using "small subjects," as he said, "on a grand scale," the "real landscape" took on "imaginary dimensions. Roughly to scale, these unappetizing models of classic American diner fare reach out to us, rather like embarrassing relatives.

Like portraits, but without the human figure, the magic of Oldenburg's sculpture is the expressive element he imparts to it. The most emotional and hilarious of the Pop artists, his brilliance is in the balance he strikes between irony and earnestness in his references to American culture. Oldenburg introduced sculpture to Pop art, beginning with a series inspired by Duchamp's "readymades" and the bluntly prosaic subjects chosen by Pop artists like Warhol and Lichtenstein.