George segal sculpture biography template
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Summary of George Segal
Using orthopedic bandages dipped in plaster, New York sculptor George Segal constructed some of the most haunting and memorable figurative art of the 20th century. Life-sized models based on his body and those of friends, family, and neighbors are seated at lunch counters, poised on street corners, or waiting in train stations. Like actors in a play that never starts, these figures inhabit three-dimensional environments that evoke everyday spaces. One can walk around them (which makes the effect all the more eerie) but they are lost in their own universe. It is impossible to warn them that the moment they are waiting for will never arrive. The most existential of the Pop artists, Segal gives us the opportunity to step outside the fast-paced consumer world in order to get a better look at how we function within it.
Accomplishments
- Designed to treat broken bones, the bandage is not just a medium but a metaphor. Segal's plaster cast sculptures, literally
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George Segal was born in New York on November 26, 1924, to a Jewish couple who emigrated from Eastern Europe. His parents first settled in the Bronx where they ran a butcher shop and later moved to a New Jersey poultry farm.
George spent many of his early years working on the poultry farm, helping his family through difficult times. For a while, George lived with his aunt in Brooklyn so that he could attend Stuyvesant Technical High School and prepare himself for a future in the math/science field. It was here that George first discovered his love for art.
During World War II, he had to curtail his studies in order to help on the family poultry farm. He later attended Pratt, Cooper Union, and finally New York University where he furthered his art education and received a teaching degree in 1949. It was during these years that Segal met other young artists eager to make statements based on the real world rather than the pure abstractionism that was all the rage. He joined the 10th
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"I discovered that ordinary human beings with no great pretensions of being handsome were somehow singing and beautiful in their rhythms. The people that I prefer to use again and again as models are friends [and relatives] with a very lively mental life...I discovered that inom had to totally respect the entity of a specific human being, and it’s a whole other set of insights, a whole other set of attitudes. It’s a different idea of beauty and it has to do with the gift of life, the gift of consciousness, the gift of a mental life."
-George Segal, 1970
A painter and sculptor, George Segal (1924–2000) came to be recognized primarily for his life-size vit plaster sculptures made from casts taken from living models which he began making in 1961. He is associated with Pop Art because of his references to mass culture and his appreciation of the relation between the fine arts and forms of popular art. However, his interest in rendering the human for