Claes Oldenburg, a Swedish-American pop artist and co-creator of the Split Button statue on Penn’s campus, died July 18. He was 93.

The Split Button that sits in front of Van Pelt Library, constructed in 1981, weighs 5,000 pounds and is 16 feet in diameter. It was created along with visual artist Coosje van Bruggen.

Mr. Oldenburg’s approach to everyday objects, performance, and collaboration has continued to influence generations of artists. As he focused more and more on sculpture, he began increasing the scale of his work, taking as his starting point ordinary objects like hamburgers, ice cream cones, and household appliances and then enlarging them to unfamiliar, often imposing dimensions.

Mr. Oldenburg was heavily influenced by the French artist Jean Dubuffet, who brought so-called outsider art into galleries and museums, upsetting the status quo of institutional art. Like many pop artists, Mr. Oldenburg also took cues from Marcel Duchamp, whose so-called readymade sculptures from the early 20th century were actually ordinary, mass-produced objects (such as a bicycle wheel or a urinal). Mr. Oldenburg’s sculptures, however, were handcrafted rather than store-bought, and he wanted them to be, as he put it, “just as mysterious as nature.”

Mr. Oldenburg is survived by two stepchildren, Paulus Kapteyn and Maartje Oldenburg; and three grandchildren. 

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