Art Basel Miami Beach Presents George Segal Solo Show
- Details
- Category: Art, Museums, Galleries
- Published on Monday, 03 December 2018 07:12
- Written by Janet Walker
For Art Basel Miami Beach 2018, Templon presents, in main section of the fair, an exceptional solo show by late pop artist George Segal (1924-2000), widely considered the most existentialist of all American artists from the pop art era.
Present in over fifty museum collections worldwide, his oeuvre, is currently undergoing a major historical rediscovery. Probably the most existentialist of all American pop artists, George Segal first gained fame in the sixties with his full-service environments populated by uncanny white plaster figures. He developed a layered plaster bandage molding technique by applying the bandages directly onto the model’s body.
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He used this technique to reveal the evocative power of gesture and its poetic, social, erotic and political dimensions. The bandage, an instrument of healing, thus becomes a metaphor for the fragility of life, underlining a need for transcendence below the body’s empty shell.
For Art Basel Miami Beach, Templon gathers four installations and a group of individuals pieces. The four installations (The Dumpster, 1994; Guinness Gold, 1885; Bus Passengers, 1997; 42nd Street Deli, 1999), were all conceived in the last decades of the artist’s career at a time when his expression became freer and more concerned with painting.
His installations turn into tableaux with large photographic panels in the background and a careful use of everyday objects, This fusion of sculpture and painting brings to life a plethora of artistic expressions via color, light and emotions. Evocative of New York street life, these environments all explore the notion of loneliness and fragility of life in contrast with the hectic seed of urban life.
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Born in 1924 in New York, George Segal lived and worked in New Jersey, USA, until his death in 2000. Since 1962, when the artist was discovered at a pop art collective exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery. George Segal’s sculptures have achieved international recognition for their ability to transform everyday realities into a theatre of mysterious and poetic apparitions.
Among his numerous solo exhibitions were major retrospectives in 1978 at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1997 at the Musee‘ des Beaux-Arts de Montreal, Canada in 1998, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; in 2002 at Utsunomiya Museum of Art, Japan, and at the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Galerie Templon presented George Segal’s worked for the first time in 1979 in Paris, as part of the group exhibition La peinture americaine.
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Galerie Templon has been representing the Estate of George Segal in France and Belgium since 2016 and organized two solo shows in 2017 in Paris and 2018 in Brussels.
George Segal Solo Show can be seen at Art Basel Miami Beach December 6-9, 2018 at Booth D2, Miami Beach, Convention Center.
All images courtesy of Galerie Templon and used with permission.
