George Sugarman

Loretta Howard Gallery is pleased to show a single three part, largescale George Sugarman sculpture, Threesome.

Known for breaking prevailing sculpture conventions of the 1960s, Sugarman defied the prohibition against painted sculpture that had dominated Western art since at least Neoclassicism. Sugarman made extensive use of color in his work. Threesome is perhaps the most elegant and graceful of Sugarman’s 1960s sculptures: distinguished in unusual period colors of pale blue, bright red, and for a two-part unit, yellow and white.

A graduate of the City College of New York, Sugarman served in the United States Navy during World War II. After the war Sugmarn studied on the GI Bill in Paris under Cubist sculptor Ossip Zadkine. He returned to New York in 1955 to begin his career as an artist. He was among the group of artists who came to prominence in the early 1960s including Anthony Caro, Donald Judd and Mark di Suvero, who made large-scale sculpture that spurned the traditional pedestals to sit directly on the floor, in the viewer's space.

Sugarman has had numerous solo exhibitions in the United States and internationally, including: Loretta Howard Gallery, Fischbach Gallery, Robert Miller Gallery, and Washburn Gallery in New York, as well as Galerie Rudolf Zwirner in Cologne and Galerie Renée Ziegler in Zurich. In 1969-1970, Kunsthalle Basel organized his first European retrospective. It traveled to the Städtisches Museum in Germany, Haus am Waldsee in Berlin, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Sugarman has work in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Walker Art Center and the Kunstmuseum.