George Sugarman a sculpture :: Essays Papers

George Sugarman a sculptureBest known today for his reality ruse, George Sugarman began his occupational group with formally eccentric painted-wood sculptures. In a revelatory New York exhibition, primeval pieces were bear witnessn alongside the 86-year-old subterfugeists more recent aluminum work. In the course of 1998, thither were a number of important sculpture exhibitions in New York galleries and museums, including the Museum of moderne Arts Tony Smith retrospective, Dias presentation of Richard Serras Torqued Ellipses, and a group of David Smiths late painted-steel kit and boodle 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 betwixt 1958 and 1995, the exhibition allowed viewers to pinch Sugarmans career from his carved-wood w orks of the late 1950s to his polychrome, laminated-wood pieces of the 1960s to the painted-aluminum work that has sedulous him since the early 1970s. fleck the show did not cover Sugarmans extensive performance 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 efficacious 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 Sugarmans 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 win a prize at the 1961 Carnegie International. Among the last of his unpainted works, its a tight 12-footlong, smoothly flowing concatenation of horizontal abstract forms that rests on two pedestals set several feet apart. Rippling patterns of chisel marks are microscopic 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 upset tools, are clearly differentiated within the continuous overall structure. While the carving technique and biomorphism relate Six Forms in Pine to constituted sculptural styles of the 1950s, the sculpture also possesses properties which presage Sugarmans innovative work of the following decade.