Sculpture of the week - Dropped Cone by Oldenburg & van Bruggen

Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen, Dropped Cone, 2001

Neumarkt Galerie, Cologne, Germany
(Image source)

Continuing on Pop Art, Claes Oldenburg is a Swedish/American artist who came to prominence in the late 50s and early 60s firstly with performance art and then with the replication of popular objects with papier mache and plaster. Van Bruggen was an art historian, curator, and critic who first collaborated with Oldenburg in 1976 on the reconstruction and relocation of his work Trowel I to the Netherlands. The pair married in 1977 and continued to collaborate on making awesomely cool colossal sculptures of everyday items.

The 40f tall ice cream cone, drips over the edge of the building on which it's been dropped - you can imagine the giant tears from the huge kid who did it! But there's more to this being cool other than through size and friendly demeanour. Dropped Cone is also architectural in its presentation. Through its location and shape, it draws parallels church spires and the modern church -the sculpture was commissioned by the owners of the Neumarkt Galerie - a shopping centre, and the sculpture was described by van Bruggen as "a cornucopia of consumerism".