Massive Garden of Sculpture to Be Created in Koll Center Irvine

The Newport Beach-based Koll Co. in September will install a sprawling, colorful sculpture by the highly regarded New York artist George Sugarman, bringing the county what promises to be its most prominent piece of public art since Isamu Noguchi finished his “California Scenario” in 1982. The company quietly commissioned the as-yet-unnamed piece two years ago and discussed it publicly for the first time this week.

Occupying a space roughly 100 feet by 75 feet, the work will consist of eight separate forms, one of them as high as 22 feet. Its abstract shapes will wander through a plaza in Koll Center Irvine, an office complex that Koll, a real estate investment company, is developing near MacArthur Boulevard at the San Diego Freeway.

“I think it will be something of a magnitude that will make a lot of people stop and comment on it,” said Mike Lewis, Koll’s vice president for development. “It will be the largest piece we have so far.”

Koll buildings already house works by several California artists, as well as works by internationally known artist Beverly Pepper.

Lewis said Koll commissioned the Sugarman because the company wanted to enhance the site’s appeal to tenants and make the business park pleasant for those who work there.

Orange County, unlike many communities, does not require developers to set aside 1% of a building’s cost for art. Lewis said developers here are trying to contribute voluntarily.

The sculpture will be one of the largest public works to date from among the 75-year-old Sugarman’s 25 such pieces nationwide. Lewis declined to say how much Koll is spending on the work.

“The major idea of the piece is that people not feel it was precious, that it was not a museum piece,” Sugarman said this week from his studio in lower Manhattan. “They could wander around the forms, sit on them, participate. The critics can come at it from their level, too, if they want. My goal is art that has quality and is also accessible.”

As in the past, Sugarman designed the benches on which viewers can sit as part of the work. “I was given a very large space to work with, and what I have made is a sculpture garden. There is a little grove of what I call my abstract trees.”

Sugarman, born in New York City, did not start sculpting until he was 39, but his work has been bought and shown by major museums throughout the country, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum in New York.

Until 1959, Sugarman worked almost exclusively in wood. He started accepting commissions for public, outdoor pieces in 1970, putting up the first at the Xerox building in El Segundo. A trademark of his large outdoor projects--one to which critics have not always been kind--has been the use of vivid color.

“Color has posed something of a dilemma for some people looking at Sugarman’s art,” said George Nubert, director of the Sheldon Memorial Gallery in Lincoln, Neb., and a recognized authority on public sculpture.

“Once you start painting the surface, do you deny the form you have created or do you enhance it? He is coming out of a tradition that includes Matisse,” said Nubert, former chief curator of the Oakland Museum.

“A good sculpture has a presence like a forceful person, and I use very forceful color,” Sugarman said. “This piece will have many colors--yellow, grays, greens, blues, a great variety. The critics looked at my first colored sculpture and found it ugly and vulgar. I couldn’t understand it. The Greeks used all kinds of color in their sculpture--purple and gold.”

Art critic Kay Larson wrote not long ago in New York Magazine that “Sugarman’s outdoor sculptures can meander through the space at the base of an architectural colossus without being forced to bring their peregrinations to an end or to compete with the scale of the building behind them. They survive because, like origami, they generate their own space.”

Sugarman said he was influenced by the abstract expressionist painters of the 1950s, including painter Jackson Pollock, “in terms of the use of space. In terms of color, it was (painter) Stuart Davis.” Sugarman also is deeply fond of jazz and has long cited it as a force behind his sculptural ideas.

The sculptor visited Orange County about a year ago and saw the Costa Mesa office plaza where the Noguchi piece is located. Noting that the Noguchi piece reflects and comments upon the natural forms of California, he said his piece will be very different.

“You’ve got enough nature down there,” he said. “I’m an urban artist, and my work is for urban people. The thrust is that this is something people can enjoy while they are passing. It is something that will engage them.”

The Sugarman commission was arranged by Tamara Thomas, a Los Angeles-based art consultant who worked with developer Henry Segerstrom on involving Noguchi in his project here. Thomas has worked extensively with executives at Columbia Savings & Loan Assn. in Los Angeles, with which Koll is developing Koll Center Irvine. The master plan for the development calls for seven, 12-story office buildings, three restaurants, three hotels and three parking structures.

The complex will be linked through a series of urban plazas and fountain courts designed for pedestrians. One of those plazas will hold the Sugarman--similar to the way in which Segerstrom has used the Noguchi.

“I think there might be a little bit of a competition going on (with the Noguchi),” Thomas said, although Koll’s Lewis denied that cultural competitiveness was a motive in purchasing the Sugarman.

“We are simply interested in using art to enhance public spaces,” Lewis said. “We are going to be doing a lot more of that as the project continues.”