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Playful, surreal Claes Oldenburg sculpture re-contextualizing a ceramic bicycle seat as a small mountain or geological feature, sitting on a bed of sand atop a square mahogany base. The ceramic component is cast from an actual bicycle seat with sculptural additions.
Claes Oldenburg describes the project:
“A bicycle seat, like a three-way electric plug, is an industrial object with the potential of becoming a sculpture. Another example is the World War I cannon meticulously carved in stone and placed by itself on a pedestal near Hyde Park Corner in London. I heard this monument was a favorite of Dubuffet.
The bicycle seat was to have been an outdoor object-sculpture in London, commissioned by Paul Cornwall-Jones for placement in front of his office on Petersburg Place near the northwest end of Kensington Gardens. As I imagined it, the seat-which in England became the saddle— would be carved of marble in a nineteenth-century cemetery style, with the surface of the saddle emerging like the polished representation of flesh out of rough stone.
The role of a bicycle seat as sculpture goes back, of course, to Picasso’s Head of a Bull (1943). I had drawn a variation of this work on a napkin in a London restaurant, substituting a sliced strawberry for the seat. The merging of these shapes seat and upended strawberry slice-turned Bicycle Saddle into a sculpture in the round, able to stand independently without a base.
Meanwhile, I had been shown experiments in ceramic sculpture conducted at the Royal College of Art under the direction of David Queensberry. Since Bicycle Saddle now had a form somewhat like a bottle, it seemed like a suitable subject for the medium, and a hollow version struck me as an interesting complement to the solid one.
As it turned out, the large marble version was never executed, due in part to the difficulty of obtaining permission for any new outdoor sculpture in London. The small version went ahead on its own as a kind of miniature of a larger work that might have been.” –Claes Oldenburg
Sculpture in the Form of a Bicycle Saddle,1976
Glazed cast ceramic, mahogany, sand
14 x 8 1/2 x 8 1/2 in / 35.3 x 21.5 x 21.5 cm (variable)
Edition of 36 in three color variants (12 each in green, brown, black; with 9 AP, 3 each in green, brown, black)
initialed in gold ink and numbered 6/36
Fabricated by The Royal College of Art, London; Published by Petersburg Press, London and New York
Condition: Ceramic saddle in excellent condition, base in good condition with light wear and a minor chip to the base, as photographed.
Catalogue reference: Platzker 17
