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July 18 (UPI) -- Claes Oldenburg, a pop artist icon, who turned everyday objects into monumental sculptures, died Monday at age 93. He died at home in the Soho section of Manhattan due to complications from a fall, according to Adriana Elgarresta, a spokeswoman for the Pace Gallery in New York. Pace Gallery, along with the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, represented him, The New York Times and The Washington Post reported.
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Oldenburg focused his art on items closely associated with human needs and desires.
"I've expressed myself consistently in objects with reference to human beings rather than through human beings," he once said, The Times reported.
Art dealer Arne Glimcher, who worked with Oldenburg since the early 1960s, said he was an observer of American culture who showed how certain objects became a part of the culture in his sculptures.
"They were prophetic," Glimcher told the Times of his sculptures. "They were sociological statements."
Oldenburg emerged on the art scene in the early 1960s, becoming famous for creating abstract expressionist, large-scale "soft sculptures" of hamburgers, and ice cream, filled with foam rubber and cardboard boxes, turning sculpture from something hard like bronze or wood to something soft, according to Glimcher.
He became an icon by the mid-1960s, and by the latter part of the decade was the subject of the first major pop art show at the Museum of Modern Art, including more than 100 of his sculptures and dozens of drawings.
His body of art work also expanded beyond museums and galleries to public work outside of them that was unrivaled by his contemporaries Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, the Post reported.
Oldenburg told the Los Angeles Times that after he moved to New York in 1956, he "realized that art had to mean more than just producing objects for galleries and museums and that I wanted to locate art in the experience of life."
Oldenburg was also known for sculpting what he called his "Colossal Monuments."
His first of such monuments, was "Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks," where a lipstick with an inflatable tip was mounted on a plywood base that resembled military tank treads. A group of Yale architecture students commissioned the sculpture to represent the antiwar slogan, "make love, not war," on campus, and the student movement against Vietnam War. Some other "Colossal Monuments" that followed included an electric plug in Oberlin, Ohio and a huge rubber stamp in Cleveland.
Oldenburg also recreated everyday things like ice cream cones, typewriter erasers, toilets, to make sculpture "more accessibly human and more cerebral at the same time, a feat that has kept it resonant in a rapidly changing art world," The New York Times arts writer Randy Kennedy wrote in 2017.
The pop artist was born in Stockholm on Jan. 28, 1929, the son of a mother who was a concert singer and a father who was a Swedish consular whose job required them to relocate often.
In 1936, his family moved to Chicago, where he had memories of his mother filing photos from American magazines that included advertising images that would provide inspiration for his work.
He graduated from Yale University where he studied literature and art, and after graduating worked as a reporter in Chicago while taking art classes at night. He made a living drawing insects for pesticide ads before moving to New York, and he split up his time between New York and France for decades.
In 2000, President Bill Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Arts.
He is survived by his three grandchildren and two stepchildren.
