FAST FOOD is not the usual inspiration for fine art, but to Oliver Clegg, McDonald’s Happy Meal toys are like what Campbell’s Soup cans were to Andy Warhol.
Over the last year, Clegg has taken amateur photographs of Happy Meal toys that he found on eBay and transformed them into paintings. Featuring characters such as Winnie the Pooh, Snoopy, Ronald McDonald and Miss Piggy, he has created 152 oil works for his first solo exhibition in New York City. The show, titled Euclid’s Porsche, can be viewed at Rental Gallery from May 1-25.
The project was about “finding inspiration from an unconventional source,” says Clegg. “You are giving meaning and legitimacy to something in a culture of worthlessness where nothing is important anymore.”
The British-born Clegg has presented his work at the Prague, Busan and Venice Biennales and created a spinning table, titled Until the Cows Come Home, that was a centerpiece of the 2014 Brooklyn Artists Ball. In 2016, he presented his first U.S. solo exhibition called Oliver Clegg: Life is a GASSSSS at Dallas Arts Week. As a part of that collection, Clegg created 10 oil-on-canvas paintings of pop culture icons, such as Garfield, Donald Duck and Hello Kitty, shown as partially deflated Mylar balloons. The pieces balance a sense of humor and seriousness.
“The subjects are kind of ambiguous and the poses play into the already established visual language that exists in my other paintings,” says Clegg, who works out of a studio attached to his Greenpoint, Brooklyn apartment that he shares with his wife, Natasha Chambers, and their two daughters.
For Euclid’s Porsche, each of the 12-by-16-inch linen canvases has been deliberately left exposed and unframed. “It’s about making and then looking at it,” says Clegg.
This show is being curated by Adam Cohen, a longtime dealer at Gagosian Gallery. Their collaboration isn’t the first meeting for Clegg and Cohen—in 2005, Cohen bought Clegg’s entire MFA degree show at the City and Guilds of London Art School. After losing touch, the pair reconnected a few years ago through sculptor Darren Bader. The exhibition will also be catalogued with text by Bader, who created over 200 working titles for the show. Ultimately, Clegg picked the title Euclid’s Porsche out of a hat for the purpose of the exhibition.
For this show, Clegg’s approach was similarly prolific: “I had it set in my head that I wanted to do 150 paintings,” he says of the Happy Meal toys. “I found my resource where I was going to have enough images.”