Educated in History of Art at the University of Groningen, Coosje van Bruggen worked as an art curator at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the city where she encountered the Dutch artistic avant-garde. An historian and art critic as well as sculptor, she began collaborating in 1975 with Swiss artist Claes Oldenburg, established in New York, whom she later married. Since then, they worked together for more than three decades, designing and making enormous sculptures of everyday objects. As an art critic, she is the author of studies about outstanding artists of the 20th century, such as John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman and Gerhard Richter, and architects like Frank O. Gehry. Her sculptures, created jointly with Oldenburg, can be found in museums and public spaces in cities like New York, Chicago, Las Vegas, Munster, Kassel, Rotterdam, Paris, Berlin, Milan and Barcelona.