Artwork
Previous Art Installations
Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen at Lever House
November 2024 – August 2026
Courtesy of the Estate of Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
Brookfield Properties and WatermanClark, in conjunction with Paula Cooper Gallery, presented Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen at Lever House from November 2024 – Summer 2026. The first significant presentation of the artists’ work since Oldenburg’s death in 2022, the exhibition featured important and career-spanning artworks installed throughout the landmark building and its outdoor spaces.
The works on view included two of the giant works for which Oldenburg and van Bruggen were so widely known, installed on the outdoor plazas and highly visible from Park Avenue, as well as plaster sculptures first shown in the East Village in 1961, iconic fabric “soft” sculptures from the 1960s and 1970s, and drawings for proposed colossal monuments (such as a Good Humor bar to replace the Pan Am Building).
A particular focus of the presentation was Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s sculptures that depict consumer products, such as toothpaste and lipstick, as Lever House was built in 1952 as the headquarters for Lever Brothers, a preeminent manufacturer of soap and consumer goods. These sculptures were displayed in the original and newly restored lobby vitrines, which Lever Brothers used to showcase their products.
Other works in the presentation touched on midcentury architecture, such as Architect’s Handkerchief, a twelve-foot tall depiction of Mies Van Der Rohe’s characteristic pocket handkerchief, and Plantoir, a 16-foot tall sculpture of a garden trowel, installed in the central courtyard adjacent to Lever House’s iconic indoor-outdoor planter (one of the building’s many firsts, and an innovation that exemplifies the building’s radical integration of indoor and outdoor space.)
New York Time: Soft and Seditious, Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen Take Manhattan
ArtNEWS: Jacob King on Oldenburg and van Bruggen, Corporate Collaboration, and Public Art
Ellsworth Kelly
May 2023 – August 2024
Brookfield Properties and WatermanClark, LLC presented Ellsworth Kelly: Sculpture at Lever House from May 2023 – August 2024, unveiling a group of important freestanding sculptures produced by Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) between 1982 and 2015. Though Ellsworth Kelly is widely regarded as one of the most significant painters, sculptors, draftsmen, and printmakers of the twentieth century, this exhibition at Lever House shed light on a lesser-known but central part of his artistic practice.
Many of the works in Ellsworth Kelly: Sculpture belong to a series of slender-yet-towering forms begun by the artist in the early 1970s, whose precise, almost classical contours take inspiration from ancient Greek figural sculpture. Mounted throughout Lever House’s newly restored indoor and outdoor spaces, this monumental body of work has seldom been the sole subject of a New York exhibition—the last major show of Kelly sculpture was staged at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1982.
The ambitious presentation offered the public a new opportunity to reevaluate a definitive series from one of America’s most influential artists, experienced within an icon of twentieth-century architecture. Freestanding planes of aluminum, bronze, and wood, Kelly’s sculptures created a dynamic interplay with Lever House’s spectacular and recently restored terrazzo, glass, and marble surfaces. A series of small-scale sculptural maquettes from throughout Kelly’s career were also displayed in the lobby’s historic metal and glass vitrines, originally built to showcase Lever Brothers’ consumer products.
Timed to the artist’s centennial on May 31, 2023, Lever House joined several other institutions across the globe in honoring Kelly’s indelible legacy with major programs, publications, and exhibitions. Alongside shows at The Museum of Modern Art, Glenstone Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Ellsworth Kelly: Sculpture at Lever House offered an important contribution to the year-long festivities.
These concurrent initiatives illuminated trajectories within Kelly’s practice, giving viewers an opportunity to view an unprecedented amount of works by the artist. Forging conversations across exhibitions, Lever House’s presentation provided a compelling juxtaposition to Kelly’s 1957 Sculpture for a Large Wall, installed at The Museum of Modern Art. Recognized as Kelly’s first sculpture, Sculpture for a Large Wall showcased a precedent for the works on view at Lever House, which trace the last three decades of the artist’s career.
