Coosje van Bruggen

Coosje van Bruggen studied at University of Groningen. The recorded working language is English and Dutch. The field of work recorded is art of sculpture. Places of work recorded in the authority are Amsterdam, Enschede and New York City. Employment is recorded with ArtEZ Art & Design Enschede. Work by Coosje van Bruggen is recorded in the collections of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Dallas Museum of Art and Denver Art Museum. Distinctions recorded are honorary degree.

• Name — Coosje van Bruggen • Birth Name — Jacoba Wilhelmina Hendrika van Bruggen • Born — 6 June 1942 • Birthplace — Groningen, Netherlands • Died — 10 January 2009 • Place of death — Los Angeles, California, U.S. • Field — Sculpture • Children — 2 • Works — List of public art by Oldenburg and van Bruggen

Born to a physician in Groningen, van Bruggen studied history of art at the University of Groningen. From 1967 to 1971, she worked at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Van Bruggen married her first husband Paul Kapteyn, they had two children, Maartje Kapteyn and Paulus Kapteyn. In Amsterdam she worked with environmental artists like Doug Wheeler, Larry Bell, and the members of the Dutch avant-garde. Until 1976, van Bruggen taught at the Academy for Art and Industries in Enschede. She married her second husband, Claes Oldenburg, in 1977 and moved to New York the following year. In 1993, she became a United States citizen.

She began working with her new husband, sculptor Claes Oldenburg, in 1976. Her first work with Oldenburg came when she helped him install his 41-foot Trowel I on the grounds of the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo. Together Oldenburg and van Bruggen produced three decades of monumental sculpture that van Bruggen would call Large-Scale Projects, with their first piece created as a team being Flashlight (1981), a huge outdoor sculpture at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In Los Angeles, Collar and Bow - a 65-foot metal and fiberglass sculpture in the shape of a man's dress shirt collar and bow tie, designed for a spot outside Walt Disney Concert Hall was stalled and eventually canceled due to technical problems and escalating costs. In 1988, her work with Oldenburg entitled Spoonbridge and Cherry was commissioned by the Walker Art Center. It became a permanent fixture of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden as well as an iconic image of the city of Minneapolis. Their final joint work, fabricated in Turin, Italy and titled Tumbling Tacks (2009), was designed for the Kistefos Sculpture Park in the countryside north of Oslo. At her instigation, the couple branched out into indoor installation and performance art. In 1985 they collaborated on Il Corso del Coltello (“The Course of the Knife”), a performance piece in Venice, Italy, with the architect Frank Gehry, whom van Bruggen had met in 1982 when she was on the selection committee for documenta 7 in Kassel. Since the early 1980s van Bruggen worked as an independent critic and curator. She contributed articles to Artforum magazine from 1983 to 1988, and served as senior critic in the sculpture department at Yale University School of Art in 1996–97. Van Bruggen was the author of scholarly books and essays on the work of major contemporary artists including Gerhard Richter (1985), John Baldessari (1990), Bruce Nauman (1991), and Hanne Darboven (1991). She also wrote a monograph on architect Frank O. Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. Van Bruggen and Oldenburg were based in New York for many years, but they also lived and worked for extensive periods in Los Angeles and, since 1992, at Château de la Borde in Beaumont-sur-Dême, in the Loire Valley of France. One U.S. installation the pair collaborated on is the fiberglass and steel Cupid's Span, which was commissioned by GAP founders Donald and Doris F. Fisher, and installed in the newly built Rincon Park along the Embarcadero in San Francisco in 2002. In 2021, Pace Gallery presented an exhibition of van Bruggen's collaborative work with Claes Oldenburg spanning the 1980s to the late 2000s. • Illustration — Bottle O'Notes (Middlesbrough) • Illustration — Flying Pins (2000), Eindhoven • Illustration — Houseball, Berlin

After a long battle with breast cancer, van Bruggen died at her residence in Los Angeles in 2009, aged 66.

Coosje van Bruggen was recorded at birth as Jacoba Wilhelmina Hendrika van Bruggen. Her recorded languages were English and Dutch. She married Claes Oldenburg.

Coosje van Bruggen worked in art of sculpture. Her work is associated with pop art. She was employed by ArtEZ Art & Design Enschede. She belonged to Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen. She worked at Amsterdam, Enschede and New York City.

Coosje van Bruggen is recorded as curator, sculptor, art historian, art critic and opinion journalist. Recognition and collections. Bruggen received honorary degree.