George Segal: Everyday Apparitions

George Segal was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. He was affiliated with the Pop Art movement of the 1960s, along with Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns. Like these artists, Segal’s work addresses the conditions of modern daily life. He is best known for his life-size plaster sculptures of human figures arrayed in tableaus. These figures, sometimes ghostly white, sometimes brightly painted, exude a melancholy and isolation that Segal explored as inherent to the human condition in the 20th century; his work has often been labeled as a sculpted version of Edward Hopper’s paintings. The works in this exhibition, including one of the iconic life-size plaster sculptures, “Young Woman in Doorway,” are recent gifts to the permanent collection from the George and Helen Segal Foundation.