The Swedish born artist, still active in the American Pop art, has focused on mass culture and everyday life. In his youth, he consciously collected waste from the streets of big cities and cheap belongings. At the beginning of the 1960s, he created everyday objects, commodities and clothes from muslin strips immersed in plaster and stretched onto wire frames. His work A Lingerie Counter was made with the use of these elements as well. Oldenburg painted the rags imitating women's underwear of the age, which had been immersed in glue and plaster, with bright color industrial enamel paint. The artist ironically mimicked a shop's efforts to display its goods in an attractive way. The underwear stiff from glue and blotted with paint, however, rather seems morbid and awkward. Oldenburg makes the ordinary clothes that are erotic in their original state "useless"; his aim is not to make artworks, but to create tension between the object stored in the museum and its vivid everyday life. According to his creed, I Am for an Art, “I am for an art that does something more than sit on its ass in a museum." K.Ü.
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The newly set collection display makes attempts to present emphatic points not only in well-organised chronological order or along stylistic features, but to examine the characteristics, consonances, differences as well as the artistic-cultural parallels between Western and Eastern art.