The Strange Eggs are a group of collages by American artist Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929). Completed over the course of two years after he moved to New York City from Chicago in 1956, they constitute some of the artist's earliest known works. Here he borrowed from the language of the mass media by collecting fragments and humble scraps cut and scavenged from commercial advertisements and images in newspapers and magazines, which he found on the street or purchased from dime stores while he was living on the Lower East Side.
The eighteen collages are characterized by self-contained forms that the artist made by seamlessly melding cut fragments of photographic reproductions. While many of the amalgams are unrecognizable, within them some original references are revealed: a piece of pie, the hind legs of a horse, a tree branch, the creased skin of a clenched fist, the texture of concrete.
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