Typewriter Eraser, Scale X

Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen created this 19-foot stainless steel and fiberglass sculpture in 1999. It depicts a typewriter eraser: a circular rubber disk with stiff bristles that people once used to rub out typing mistakes before computers existed. The object was already obsolete when the artists made it, which was part of the point. Oldenburg remembered playing with these erasers in his father's office as a child, and the oversized recreation turns a forgotten tool into something monumental.

Oldenburg (1929-2022) and van Bruggen (1942-2009) were a husband-and-wife team who spent three decades making giant pop sculptures of everyday objects. They met when van Bruggen was a curator at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, married in 1977, and produced their first collaboration ("Flashlight") in 1981. This piece lives at the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, part of the Seattle Art Museum's outdoor collection. Other casts are installed at the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC.