Woman Sitting on a Bed

In the early 1980s, George Segal dropped colour and realist props from his compositions and began to paint his backgrounds black. “I am looking a lot at Rembrandt, I am looking at Old Master paintings that are really a flat canvas that magically has been painted to resemble a three-dimensional sculpture. And I am trying the reverse. I am making a three-dimensional sculpture to see what happens if I can indicate some of those strange lights and darks that are purely imaginative.” This work presents itself simultaneously as a realist scene and as an allegory. Seated in harsh light in a world completely black, her slightly bent back turned towards the viewer, this woman is shown at a mundane moment of the day – in her extreme exhaustion, she embodies the weariness of the world.