George Segal (artist)
George Segal (born November 26, 1924 in New York City , NY , † June 9, 2000 in New Brunswick ) was an American artist who was best known for his plaster sculptures.
Biography and work
George Segal was born in New York in 1924 as the son of Polish immigrants. He began studying art at the Cooper Union School of Art in 1941 . Due to the outbreak of war in the USA and the work he had to do on his parents' chicken farm as a result, he had to interrupt his studies after just one year. In 1946 he finally continued his studies at Rutgers University .
Segal's early drawings and pictures from the 1950s depict people in often very dramatic situations. During this phase, Segal sought the transition from the image to the real space.
He was a participant in the 4th documenta in Kassel in 1968 and also represented as an artist at Documenta 6 in 1977. In 1979 he was admitted to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1981 to the American Academy of Arts and Letters . In 1999, George Segal was elected a member ( NA ) of the National Academy of Design .
Plastic work
In the course of the newly emerging Pop Art , Segal began to create figures with plaster of paris and in 1959/60 he presented his first situational sculpture “Man on a bicycle”. The combination of plaster figures and real objects is typical for Segal. In this example, the cyclist is made of plaster of paris, whereas the bicycle is a commercially available item.
In his first sculptures, the artist still worked with wood and wire as a framework for his figures. In 1961 he switched to making direct body impressions with plaster bandages. After removing the plaster shell, they were put together to form a body. In the years that followed, environments such as “Cinema” (1963) and “The Restaurant” (1967) were created using real objects .
Works (selection)
- 1964: Rock and Roll Combo , plaster figure
- 1965: Portrait of Robert and Ethel Scull , plaster and sofa, Aichi Prefectural Museum of Arts,
- 1970 Alice, listening to her poems and music , plaster figure
- 1985: Woman in Lace , bronze painted white
- 1989: Chance Meeting , bronze, 310 × 117 × 193 cm
- 1989: Woman on a Bench , bronze painted white and metal bench , 132.1 × 182.9 × 94 cm
Body parts become art
Over many years, large quantities of unassembled plaster molds had been collected that Segal did not want to use in his previous work because he found them not suitable or aesthetic enough. In 1969 he began to process the remains into his own sculptures and reliefs and to process fragments of a body into new structures. The fragments showed individual body parts such as breasts, buttocks, shoulders, and chin areas.
Color composition
Segal has mostly completely done without colors. When he used colors, most of the figures were monochrome. The monochrome "skin" that the figure gets should take away the naturalistic impression and reinforce the fictional impression of the scene. This play with colors should invite the viewer to step into the action. In “Woman against black window” , a later work by George Segal, he combined torso and color . The scantily clad woman, of whom you can only see the half-naked torso, stands in front of a black window in a black wall.
Still life
In the early 1980s, plaster of paris was poured over fruits, bottles and other objects to create sculptural still lifes.
Artistic effects
With his environmental sculptures Segal is not looking for the spectacular, he wants to capture everyday life that the eye no longer perceives because it has become too common. In this way it reflects the conditions of American society. Segal's works sometimes seem bleak, which is reinforced by the lack of any communication. The anonymity and isolation of each individual figure also raise the melancholy structure of each scene. The life-size figurative works have on the one hand a direct reference to reality due to the work process, on the other hand the colorless plaster alienates and generalizes the depicted scenes, in which the viewer is included.
Quote
“I perceive my life in relation to objects, and I see these objects for what they are, namely as plastic, aesthetic forms. And what fascinates me about it is the way they treat them in a non-human way. "
literature
- George Segal a publication of the Kunsthalle Tübingen and the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 1972
- Phyllis Tuchman: Segal. Munich 1984. ISBN 3-7658-0444-4
- Caroll Janis / Dirk Teuber: George Segal , exhibition catalog
Web links
- Literature by and about George Segal in the catalog of the German National Library
- The George and Helen Segal Foundation
- Materials by and about George Segal in the documenta archive
Individual evidence
- ^ Members: George Segal. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 25, 2019 .
- ↑ nationalacademy.org: Past Academicians "S" / Segal, George NA 1999 ( Memento of the original from March 20, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (accessed on July 15, 2015)
- ↑ spiegel.de: Imprint of the inner man (accessed December 10, 2015)
- ↑ artregister.com: George Segal: Woman Against Black Window, 1989-90 (accessed July 15, 2015)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Segal, George |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American artist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 26, 1924 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | New York , NY |
| DATE OF DEATH | June 9, 2000 |
| Place of death | Brunswick |