Man on the bench

This sculpture depicts a young African-American man sitting on a public bench. Through the young man’s relaxed posture, Segal illustrates the rare moment of rest accorded to middle-class American workers. The life-size figures give the impression of being mummies imprisoned for eternity. They are always melancholic representations of people who are shut off in their solitude. Segal liked to incorporate real objects in his sculptures, such as the bench in Man on the Bench. This insertion of objects which man himself has created illustrates his imprisonment in the structure of his culture. Another version of this sculpture in whitewashed bronze, dating from 1986, is exhibited in the garden of the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.

George Segal was an American artist. He was born in 1924 in New York and died in 2000 in New Jersey. First a painter then a sculptor (from 1960), he was associated with the New York Pop Art movement. The son of Jewish migrants from Poland, he studied architecture and design before graduating from New York University, where he obtained a teaching post in the Art Education Department in 1949. He joined the group of artists at the Hansa Gallery in New York, where he met Allan Kaprow, considered to be one of the fathers of “Happening”. In the 1960s, Segal used Johnson & Johnson brand medical bandages to create white plaster moulds from the bodies of models (“life casting”). Once completed, he used these moulds as artworks. He himself was the model for his first sculpture, Man at the Table, in 1961. These figures are then combined with objects which often come from the urban landscape. Many of his works remain whitewashed, some have been dyed bright colours and others have served as moulds for bronze sculptures.
His works are distributed across the collections of many international museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim in New York City. His works were exhibited in the Principality at the 3rd and 4th Monte-Carlo Sculpture Biennales and at the 1st Monte-Carlo International Sculpture Festival in 2000.