NEW YORK, NY.- Coinciding with the artist’s retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Christie’s Private Sales exhibits Claes Oldenburg’s acclaimed sculpture of 1976 on Madison Avenue, just one block from the MoMA.

While the Museum of Modern Art exhibition (April 14–August 5, 2013) examines the beginnings of Oldenburg’s extraordinary career with an in-depth look at his first two major bodies of work: The Street (1960) and The Store (1961–64), Christie’s Private Sales illustrates the artist’s later work of the 1970s, when Oldenburg began sketching the mass-produced typewriter eraser, which he rendered within imagined landscapes in order to explore its potential as a large public sculpture. Executed in 1976, Typewriter Eraser consists of a giant disk-shaped eraser surmounted by a large brush, with bristles turned upward in dynamic grace. Oldenburg transforms this once-ubiquitous office accessory, wryly repositioned as a large monument.

Oldenburg was initially drawn to the concept of an enlarged typewriter eraser as it seemed like "a fine anti-heroic subject"— perfectly suited for the office plaza on Manhattan's Fifty-Seventh Street. This now-obsolete item of stationary had been a favorite plaything from Oldenburg’s days of visiting his father's office as a boy. Although this project was never realized, Oldenburg remained strongly attached to this strangely exuberant object and continued to use the idea for a number of drawings, prints and sculptures in varying scales and mediums, including this metal and cement version executed in a small edition of three.

Typewriter eraser was sold at Christie's in New York, on May 2009 for the world auction record price of $2,210,500, and is now offered for private sale by Christie’s.