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Mark di Suvero — Untitled (Squat Bugger)
Mark di Suvero

Untitled (Squat Bugger)

1971

Steel bends to di Suvero's will in this compact yet forceful 1971 sculpture, where industrial material is coaxed into a form that vibrates with the raw physicality central to the artist's practice. Measuring just under half a meter in height yet spanning nearly eighty centimeters at its widest point, the work carries a low, grounded presence that belies its modest scale. The title, characteristically irreverent, hints at di Suvero's longstanding embrace of vernacular language as a counterweight to the elevated rhetoric often surrounding abstract sculpture, inviting an immediate, almost instinctive response from the viewer before any formal analysis begins. Di Suvero came to prominence in the early 1960s as a sculptor who transformed the gestural energy of Abstract Expressionist painting into three-dimensional, often monumental form, working with salvaged timber and steel at a time when such materials carried the weight of postwar urgency. This signed work from 1971 represents a particularly charged moment in his career, coinciding with a period of intense political engagement and his self-imposed exile from the United States in protest of the Vietnam War. Collectors engaging with the piece encounter not merely a formal exercise in steel construction but a document of a specific cultural and biographical moment, compact in scale yet expansive in its implications. The work's signed status and provenance through a prominent international auction house reinforce its standing as a serious acquisition for those committed to postwar and contemporary American sculpture. Its intimate dimensions make it a rare opportunity to hold a piece of di Suvero's vision in a domestic or smaller institutional context, offering the kind of daily, close engagement that his larger public works, by their very nature, cannot provide.

Medium
Steel
Overall
Signed
Yes

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About this work

Mark di Suvero, Untitled (Squat Bugger), 1971

Steel bends to di Suvero's will in this compact yet forceful 1971 sculpture, where industrial material is coaxed into a form that vibrates with the raw physicality central to the artist's practice. Measuring just under half a meter in height yet spanning nearly eighty centimeters at its widest point, the work carries a low, grounded presence that belies its modest scale. The title, characteristically irreverent, hints at di Suvero's longstanding embrace of vernacular language as a counterweight to the elevated rhetoric often surrounding abstract sculpture, inviting an immediate, almost instinctive response from the viewer before any formal analysis begins. Di Suvero came to prominence in the early 1960s as a sculptor who transformed the gestural energy of Abstract Expressionist painting into three-dimensional, often monumental form, working with salvaged timber and steel at a time when such materials carried the weight of postwar urgency. This signed work from 1971 represents a particularly charged moment in his career, coinciding with a period of intense political engagement and his self-imposed exile from the United States in protest of the Vietnam War. Collectors engaging with the piece encounter not merely a formal exercise in steel construction but a document of a specific cultural and biographical moment, compact in scale yet expansive in its implications. The work's signed status and provenance through a prominent international auction house reinforce its standing as a serious acquisition for those committed to postwar and contemporary American sculpture. Its intimate dimensions make it a rare opportunity to hold a piece of di Suvero's vision in a domestic or smaller institutional context, offering the kind of daily, close engagement that his larger public works, by their very nature, cannot provide.

Medium
Steel
Dimensions
overall: 48.9 x 78.7 x 55.9 cm
Year
1971
Signed
Hand-signed by the artist
Seen at
Sotheby's: Contemporary Art Day Auction

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Collected by

Alex Capecelatro, Derek Jones, Susanne Cooper, Benji Stoore