Though Claes Oldenburg is best known as a sculptor, he was also a talented and imaginative visual artist, adept with pencil and pen, and dabbling productively in various etching techniques. It comes as no surprise that he was put to work drawing erotic drawings for his classmates while still at school. Proving himself exceedingly skilled at illustrating sexual fantasies, Oldenburg created erotic collages by fusing the bodies of fashion models and pin-ups.

Most of his erotic drawings and etchings were produced in brief bursts in the 1960s and 1970s while the artist was travelling. Often executed in hotels, the works evince a sense of open, unrestricted possibility offered by anonymity in interchangeable rooms.

Oldenburg’s erotic fantasies were executed with a combination of startlingly explicit and imaginative sexual acts, combined with scholarly art historical references that range from Watteau to Medusa and the Sphinx. Elsewhere, Oldenburg’s favourite household objects such as vacuum cleaners and telephones are regularly animated and imbued with sexual intent.

Rarely labelled an erotic artist, eroticism is one of the most persistent undercurrents in Oldenburg’s work. From the early 1960s onward, his soft sculptures invite associations with flesh, arousal and fatigue, turning hard, functional objects into yielding, vulnerable forms. This material transformation has an unmistakably erotic dimension; the sculptures slump, bulge, fold and crease like bodies.

Oldenburg’s drawings and writings reinforce this reading. His notebooks are filled with mock-heroic descriptions of objects treated as lovers, enemies or fetishised companions, while the drawings depict fantasies of extreme sexual encounters, massive cocks, frenzied orgies. The erotic charge is often comic, but the comedy sharpens rather than neutralises, revealing how desire permeates a consumerist society.

Once he had created a composition he was pleased with, he would often create multiple versions, and this selection of Oldenburg’s work includes a number of examples.