Loretta Howard Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of painted aluminum sculptures by George Sugarman (1912 – 1999). Completed in the 1980s and 1990s, the works continue the artist’s lifelong exploration of the expressive capabilities of minimal form. Coming to prominence in the 1960s, his sculptures expand upon formalism with a playful touch. Sugarman explained of his work:
All art is metaphor…sheer physical stimulation or the insistence on a system of formal relationships that has meaning in and for itself. Metaphor, stimulation, formal relationships, three ways to meaning. Is it necessary to choose? My choice has not been to eliminate but to keep all possible sources of meaning open. Open is a word I like… Complexity is another.
George Sugarman had retrospectives at the Kunstmuseum in Basel, Switzerland, in 1969 and at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha in 1982. A truncated version of the Omaha show was seen in Manhattan at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1986. His most recent New York exhibition was in 1998 at Hunter College in New York, where he taught from 1960 to 1970. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Walker Art Center and the Kunstmuseum.