NEW BRUNSWICK, NEW JERSEY.- The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum is proud to present George Segal: Sculpture, Paintings, and Drawings from the Artist’s Studio. This exhibition of 90 works, while representing all major aspects of the artist’s career from 1957 to 2000, emphasizes a very significant part of his oeuvre that has not previously been the focus of his traveling retrospectives: the wall-mounted works. These are of two formats: three-dimensional and two-dimensional. The former category contains high reliefs, imagery in box-frame formats, "shelf" sculptures, and figural subjects in white and various colors combined with found objects. The latter category comprises Segal’s extensive production of paintings, pastels, and drawings, many in rather large scale. The exhibition will be on view from January 26 to May 25, 2003.

George Segal has been acclaimed as one of the major sculptors of the late twentieth century. While drawing (in graphite and pastel) and painting have always been integral to the artist’s production, Segal’s international reputation was built upon his work in sculpture, especially the combination of human figures cast in plaster directly from models with objects and environments, often with actual pieces of furniture or other artifacts. 

Segal’s figural reliefs show the artist’s fascination with ancient figural fragments, and his variants on the theme of the partial figure evoke mystery, human frailty, or a sense of a fleeting moment of time. Segal’s reliefs based on Cubist paintings and collages emphasize his formal and compositional interests.  The reliefs comprising objects arranged on shelves also stress compositional rigor, and reveal the artist’s desire to work with arrangement of units of color through these carefully positioned still life formats.  Segal’s paintings, in general, allowed the artist to explore his expressionist tendencies and to revel in bright, vivid colors -- a surprising contrast to his white plaster figures frozen in time.  The drawings -- especially the late close-up portraits inspired by Segal’s admiration of Rembrandt -- scrutinize the human face as a conveyer of profound emotion, and bring to the fore the humanistic core of Segal’s art.  About one-third of the works in the exhibition are three-dimensional; about two-thirds are two-dimensional.

Born in New York City in 1924 and after 1940 a resident of South Brunswick, New Jersey, Segal actively pursued his career in art from 1953 until his death in 2000.  In 1963, he received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Rutgers University.  While painting, drawing, and printmaking were always aspects of the artist’s production, Segal’s international reputation was built upon his work in sculpture, the hallmark of which is the combination of human figures cast in plaster directly from models with objects and environments, usually actual pieces of furniture or other artifacts.  His environmental works have often represented "slices of life," for example, an entire wall of a gas station, complete with oilcans and a soda vending machine, or a section of a real New York City subway car.

Segal’s use of these fragments of reality associated him with Pop Art.  He developed his sculptural subjects and techniques during the early 1960s, chronologically parallel to the rise and recognition of Pop Art, and participated in Allan Kaprow’s "Happenings" in 1959, these free-form events being among the significant sources for the Pop sensibility.  Nevertheless, Segal maintained an ambiguous relationship to Pop Art, and has stated, "I feel detached from the phrase Pop Art and yet I have a fondness for it.... Pop Art is a great label for a serious movement that produced a lot of excellent work. "What separates Segal’s work from Pop Art is Segal’s unremitting emphasis on, and empathy with, human relationships and emotions. Whereas Pop Art’s everyday objects are sometimes merely ironic or self-celebratory, Segal’s environments are meant to elicit moods and feelings.  Segal sometimes chose to portray scenes from the Bible to explore profound questions of human ethics, and developed themes through allusion and allegory, thus demonstrating a rather different approach from what is generally regarded as Pop.

Segal’s early plaster figures retained the natural whiteness of the plaster from which the casts were made.  Later he began to apply color to the figures -- red, blue, black, and other hues.  He also widened his format repertory to include figural fragments and still lifes. The wide critical acceptance of Segal’s art has been bolstered by a considerable number of public commissions. 

The presentation at the Zimmerli is the final venue for this exhibition’s international tour that included several stops in Japan, as well as the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.