George Sugarman a sculpture :: Essays Papers

George Sugarman a sculptureBest known today for his public art, George Sugarman began his career with formally eccentric painted-wood sculptures. In a suggestive in the alin concert York exhibition, early pieces were shown alongside the 86-year-old artists more recent aluminum work. In the course of 1998, there were a number of important sculpture exhibitions in New York galleries and museums, including the Museum of Modern Arts Tony Smith retrospective, Dias presentation of Richard Serras Torqued Ellipses, and a group of David Smiths late painted-steel works at Gagosian Gallery. For me, however, the most impressive and thought-provoking sculpture show of the year was a concise survey of George Sugarmans work presented by Hunter College at the galleries in its Fine Arts Building on Manhattans West 41st Street. Bringing together 16 sculptures made between 1958 and 1995, the exhibition allowed viewers to trace Sugarmans career from his carved-wood works of the late 1950s to his polyc hrome, laminated-wood pieces of the 1960s to the painted-aluminum work that has occupied him since the early 1970s. art object the show did not cover Sugarmans extensive activity in the public-art realm--over the last 30 years he has created large-scale public sculptures throughout the U.S. as well up as in Europe and Asia--it was an effective presentation of his indoor work. (Sugarman has drawn a useful distinction between what he calls the indoor eye, a museum- and gallery-oriented chaste vision which perceives the work of art in isolation from its surroundings, and the outdoor eye,which allows us to view public art as part of a wider environment.) Thanks to the nominal head of major, rarely seen works such as Two in One (1966) and Ten (1968), the show was a welcome reminder of Sugarmans unique and indispensable constituent to postwar sculpture. One of the earliest works on view was Six Forms in Pine (1959), a carved-wood sculpture which brought Sugarman his first major recog nition when it win a prize at the 1961 Carnegie International. Among the last of his unpainted works, its a nearly 12-footlong, smoothly flowing concatenation of horizontal abstract forms that rests on two pedestals sort out several feet apart. Rippling patterns of chisel marks are visible across every surface as are the strata of the laminated wood. The forms, which range from gently swelling, landscape-like shapes to more crisply defined volumes that evoke architecture or hand tools, are clearly differentiated within the continuous overall structure. While the carving technique and biomorphism stir Six Forms in Pine to established sculptural styles of the 1950s, the sculpture also possesses properties which presage Sugarmans innovative work of the next decade.