Galerie Templon is presenting the first George Segal exhibition in Belgium in 30 years. One of the most singular Pop art artists, Georges Segal became famous in the 60s in New York with his environments populated by disturbing plaster figures and objects.

George Segal’s tableaux are reflections on the individual and the consumer society. He plays on the permeability of spaces, inviting the viewer to converse with his anonymous and motionless figures. George Segal developed a layered plaster bandage moulding technique by applying the bandages directly to the model’s body. He used this technique to reveal the evocative power of gesture and its poetic, social, erotic and political dimensions.

The exhibition features a comprehensive selection of the American artist’s works, including pieces from his substantial expressionnist period in the 90’s. Originally a realist, George Segal’s works began to evolve in the 1970s, turning towards a more expansive and freer style of expression. The coloured works of the 1980s, both figurative paintings and still lives, enter into a dialogue with the history of art and master painters like Cézanne and Degas. By isolating and highlighting fragments of body parts, the artist creates opulent bas-reliefs and series of erotic paintings (Miles and Monique ). In the 1990s (Woman in a Summer Landscape, The Dumpster, Blue Woman on a Bed), the artist shifted his focus to expressionist naturalism where the fusion of sculpture and painting brings to life a plethora of artistic expressions via colour, light and emotions

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 group Pop art collective exhibition, George Segal’s sculptures have achieved international acclaim. Among his numerous solo exhibitions were major retrospectives in 1978 at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis ; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA ; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, USA, in 1997 at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal (Canada), in 1998 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C; in 2002 at Utsunomiya Museum of Art, Utsunomia, Japan and at the Hermitage State Museum in St Petersburg(Russia). Galerie Templon presented George Segal’s works for the first time in 1979 in Paris, as part of the group exhibition La peinture américaine. George Segal’s work features in the most prestigious international collections, such as the MoMA (New York), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), du Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris (MamvP), Kunsthaus Zurich or Israel Museum.