Van Bruggen worked in partnership with Claes Oldenburg since 1976, when they rebuilt and relocated Trowel I, originally shown at Sonsbeek 71, to the sculpture garden of the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, the Netherlands. In 1978 van Bruggen moved to New York (becoming an American citizen in 1993) where she continued to work with Oldenburg to establish direct contact with a wider audience by creating site-specific large-scale urban works. Their collaboration eventually extended to smaller-scale park and garden sculptures as well as to indoor installations.

Over the next ten years, Coosje van Bruggen also served as an international independent curator and critic and lectured widely: she was a member of the selection committee for Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany (1982); a contributor to Artforum (1983-1988); and Senior Critic in the Department of Sculpture at Yale University School of Art in New Haven (1996-1997). In addition to her extensive writings on Oldenburg’s early work and on the collaborative projects, she created the characters for the performance Il Corso del Coltello (Venice, 1985). Van Bruggen is the author of essays on Richard Artschwager and Gerhard Richter and books on John Baldessari, Hanne Darboven, Bruce Nauman and Frank O. Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

Ms. van Bruggen passed away in Los Angeles, CA in January 2009.

Courtesy Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen