Floor Cone is one of three large-scale soft sculptures that Oldenburg produced with his then wife, Patty Mucha, for the second exhibition of The Store, at New York’s Green Gallery. Simplified to cone and sphere, the sculpture is instantly identifiable as an ice cream cone. Mucha recalls taking the work for a drive in a pickup truck along West Fifty-seventh Street, where the Green Gallery was located, and encountering a warm reception from children in passing cars, who “shouted out their approval.” However, the sculpture’s relationship to its real-world referent is complicated by both its size and its material. Oldenburg exacerbated this deformation caused by gravity for his 1963 solo show at Los Angeles’s Dwan Gallery, during which he propped Floor Cone upside down against a wall.
Gallery label from Claes Oldenburg: The Street and The Store, April 14–August 5, 2013.
