An artist who believes in the interpretation and interrelation of art and life, Claes Oldenburg is famous for his multimedia performances and artistic projects rooted in popular culture that mirror the human experience in surprising and sometimes unsettling ways.  We are fortunate to have several signed, numbered lithographs from Oldenburg's original Notes in  Hand in which he uncovered the mystery and power of commonplace objects by morphing their scale, shape, and texture, embracing what he calls “the poetry of everywhere” The artist’s inventive working process is cumulative. He orders his impressions of the world through sketches and writings in his ever-present notebooks; models and drawings form another layer of thinking. Some ideas are realized as sculptures, ranging from the intimately scaled to the monumental, while others undergo a years-long period of study and change. Born in Stockholm in 1929 and raised in Chicago by diplomat parents, Oldenburg moved to New York in 1956. In 1960, he staged his first major project, entitled The Street, at the Judson Gallery  Notes in Hand is a mini work of art itself and was published by Petersburg Press in 1971. Claes Oldenburg kept a series of pressure binders in which he mounted scraps of paper and drawings, and made notes. This selection of fifty pages from his notebooks is colorful and playful, with his scribblings decoded on the facing pages. At the end of the Petersburg book, there are notes on which of the pages were eventually the inspiration for completed works.