irregularly shaped pieces of wood that have been pressed together to create a kind of sideways sculptural sandwich. With few, if any, precedents in thehistory of sculpture, this playfully inventive blue element (in and of itself, as well as in relation to the red form) announces Sugarman's gift for finding newkinds of sculptural syntax. When the Hunter exhibition picks up the tale again, it's 1966, the year Sugarman made one of the most striking works of his career, Two in One. At firstglance, this sculpture, which was given a gallery unto itself, looks like it should really be called Nineteen in One, since it consists not of two but of 19different painted-wood forms laid out in a narrow, 24-foot-long V formation. At the apex of the V is a dark-purple, floor-hugging geometric shape thatlooks like a freestanding sculpture toppled by some careless passerby. The two rows of forms branching out from this flattened keystone are as abundantand various as the contents of a child's box of toys. The palette can shift, in the space of four elements, from yellow green to cobalt violet to black tocerulean blue, but just when it appears that Sugarman's system is to give every part a different color, you notice a sequence of three adjacent shapes paintedbright yellow. The shapes and sizes of the elements are, if anything, even more varied than their colors. Sugarman juxtaposes solid and squat forms withothers that are cantilevered or attenuated; he creates internal volumes by both organic and geometric enclosures; singlemass forms give way to latticelikestructures; a knee-high form is succeeded by a towering 11-foot presence. Some of the individual parts are themselves multifarious, such as a low-lying,raw-sienna piece near the junction of the two rows which combines a highly abstracted kneeling figure, a cantilevered beam and an upright plane (it lookslike a snowplow blade) that seems to be pushing the rest of the sculpture before it. This veritabl...
