Coosje van Bruggen

Dutch American, 1942 - 2009

BiographyCoosje van Bruggen was born in 1942 in Groningen, Netherlands. She received an MA in Art History with a minor in French Literature from the city's Rijksuniversiteit. In 1967 Van Bruggen began working as an assistant curator of painting and sculpture for the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Inspired by the first generation of Conceptual artists emerging at the time, she left the museum in 1971 to join the Enschede Academy of Visual Arts, where she taught art history and fine arts for five years.

In 1976, during Claes Oldenburg's installation of Trowel I (1971) at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, Netherlands, Van Bruggen suggested that the sculpture be bright blue rather than its original color of silver. She was familiar with the work since it had first been shown at Sonsbeek 71, an exhibition of sculpture that took place throughout various locations in the Netherlands and for which Van Bruggen co-edited a catalogue. Oldenburg took her suggestion and the two began a relationship as collaborators. The couple wed in 1977 and the following year left the Netherlands to move into a SoHo, New York, building recently purchased by Oldenburg. Over the next three decades they worked collaboratively on drawings, installations, performances, and most prominently, over 40 site-specific public sculptures they called the "Large-Scale Projects." Their massive enlargements of quotidian objects such as shuttlecocks, knives, and blueberry pie slices are permanently installed in urban sites around Asia, Europe, and the United States.

In 1982, working as a curator, art historian, and artist, Van Bruggen was invited to join the selection committee for Documenta 7, Kassel, Germany. While there, she met Frank Gehry. This led to a lasting friendship and several collaborations among the architect, herself, and Oldenburg. In 1987 Van Bruggen wrote about Gehry's work for his Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, retrospective, and ten years later she completed a book dedicated to his designs for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. She authored monographs on Bruce Nauman (1988) and John Baldessari (1990), and conceived of a limited edition artist book by Hanne Darboven (1991). Van Bruggen was also known as the primary historian of Oldenburg's work, about which she wrote extensively. Between 1979 and 1991, she completed five books on the subject, including their collaborative projects. She also wrote essays on the work of Richard Artschwager, Stanley Brouwn, Gerhard Richter, Lawrence Weiner, and Robert Whitman, to name but a few. In 1984 she guest curated the exhibition Jenny Holzer, Stephen Prina, Mark Stahl, Christopher Williams for Gewad (now the Gewad, Centre for Contemporary Art), Ghent, and de Appel, Amsterdam. It traveled to Galerie Crousel-Hussenot, Paris.

In 1993 Van Bruggen became an American citizen. From 1996 to 1997 she was Senior Critic in the Department of Sculpture at Yale University School of Art, New Haven. Her final collaboration with Oldenburg, Tumbling Tacks, is installed on the grounds of the Kistefos-museet, Jevnaker, Norway (2009).

Information retrieved from https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/claes-oldenburg-and-coosje-van-bruggen in 01/2025.

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