AN artist like Claes Oldenburg makes you feel small and that is not because of his giant sculptures of bowling pins or shuttles. Check out these 41 sand filled, sown cloth letters below. He made this ‘soft alphabet’ in 1978. In the early sixties he made with the same principle ‘Soft Calendar for the Month of August’. I don’t know if it’s because we’re stucked in retro, but this looks very ‘now’.
Oldenburg had a thing with letters. Take for example the sculpture ‘Alphabet in the Form of a Good Humor Bar’, a huge sculpture named after a famous ice-cream brand. The bubbling letters of the alphabet are squashed together in a huge bar. Sometimes he focused on just one letter, like the Q. When Oldenburg began to explore the possibilities of the letter, he realized “an inverted position seemed necessary because a Q with its tail buried wouldn’t be a Q at all.” So he flipped it and named it the ‘Inverted Q.’

……………………. Soft Alphabet, 1978

……………………. Soft Calendar for the Month of August, 1962

……………………. Good Humor Bar / Inverted Q