's Cathedra Petri and the Ecstasy of St. Theresa, where the sculptural forms burst out of theirarchitectural niches.(5) After his return to New York, he began to incorporate a Baroque sense of formal abundance into the abstract language of modernart. In 1993, Sugarman recalled his artistic concerns of the late 1950s and early 1960s and how they led him to make sculptures that left the pedestal andincorporated wildly dissimilar shapes: Space fascinated me. Why did most sculptures use a vertical, figure-like space even with abstract forms? I looked around. Objects and living things crawledand spread out on the ground. You had to bend down to see them properly. Your body had a different relationship to them. Some things climbed up,hugging other things for support. Others hung above your head. Objects were broken up, yet remained continuous. Some forms very different from eachother were adjacent yet made a coherent image. Space was used in every conceivable way. It was active, it was as if it adapted itself to the needs of the world,that its role was not merely passive.(6) Intermittently in the late 1960s and more intensely from 1970 on, Sugarman's investigation of active space took the form of outdoor, public sculptures.While, as already noted, the Hunter exhibition skipped this aspect of Sugarman's career, the show did include Yellow to White to Blue to Black (1967), thesculpture that became the model for the first of Sugarman's public commissions, for the Xerox Corporation in El Segundo, Calif. In contrast to Two in One,this work's four streamlined forms, which describe a variety of internal volumes, are spaced out widely from one another. The roughly 3 1/2-foot-highpieces are also characterized by Sugarman's emerging interest in larger, curving planes. This tendency toward sleeker shapes finds its fullest expression in Ten (1968-69), a compelling, and in some ways uncharacteristic, work which was one ofthe last sculptures Sugarman made ...
