colors, incongruous elements). And it's equally noteworthy that after completing Ten he didn't go onturning out variations on the theme. After a quick stop in 1970 for Green and White Spiral, a tour-de-force demonstration of how to arrive at formal complexity by multiplying andrepositioning a single element, the Hunter show skipped ahead to 1987. In the intervening years, Sugarman embraced the medium of painted aluminum,both for large-scale outdoor works and smaller sculptures. (It would have been interesting to see some of the maquettes Sugarman fashions, using a pliablepaper and leather compound, for the aluminum works.) In the 1970s, as well as creating public sculptures around the country, Sugarman expanded his practice to include wall reliefs and acrylic paintings.Responding to the properties of his new materials, while still retaining his enthusiasm for color and irregular shapes, he opted for different kinds of forms,building sculptures out of fiat, foliage-like elements. After the austerities of the Minimalist 1960s, his work found a more congenial art-world environmentin the mid-'70s. In his recent survey Art of the Postmodern Era, Irving Sandler discusses Sugarman's 1970s work in the chapter on "Pattern and DecorationPainting," noting how the "profuse forms and exuberant color" of his early 1970s work "stunned" the younger P & D artists.(9) (Sandler also makes theintriguing suggestion that Sugarman's painted-metal works may have influenced the metal reliefs Frank Stella began making in the mid-1970s, when theerstwhile Minimalist embraced wildly colored, curvilinear forms.) The seven sculptures from the late '80s and '90s that rounded out the Hunter College exhibition demonstrated that Sugarman, who turns 87 this year, hascontinued to evolve artistically. The Hanging Men (1987), is a freestanding, black-and-white structure that evokes mechanical objects such as gears, ruddersand airplane parts. The sculpture seems to reject th...
