George Sugarman a sculpture :: Essays Papers

George Sugarman a sculpture Best known today for his public art, George Sugarman began his career with formally eccentric painted-wood sculptures. In a revelatory New York exhibition, early pieces were shown alongside the 86-year-old artist's 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 Art's Tony Smith retrospective, Dia's presentation of Richard Serra's Torqued Ellipses, and a group of David Smith's 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 Sugarman's work presented by Hunter College at the galleries in its Fine Arts Building on Manhattan's West 41st Street. Bringing together 16 sculptures made between 1958 and 1995, the exhibition allowed viewers to trace Sugarman's career from his carved-wood works of the late 1950s to his polychrome, laminated-wood pieces of the 1960s to the painted-aluminum work that has occupied him since the early 1970s. While the show did not cover Sugarman's 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 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 esthetic 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 presence of major, rarely seen works such as Two in One (1966) and Ten (1968), the show was a welcome reminder of Sugarman's unique and indispensable contribution 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 recognition when it won a prize at the 1961 Carnegie International. Among the last of his unpainted works, it's a nearly 12-foot long, smoothly flowing concatenation of horizontal abstract forms that rests on two pedestals set 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 sharply defined volumes that evoke architecture or hand tools, are clearly differentiated within the continuous overall structure. While the carving technique and biomorphism relate Six Forms in Pine to established sculptural styles of the 1950s, the sculpture also possesses properties which presage Sugarman's innovative work of the next decade.