Chance Meeting

Exploring man’s place within the urban environment, George Segal executed Chance Meeting in 1989. His four-part sculpture is a variation from his recognizable plaster casts: the figural grouping is cast in bronze—a change in medium that inverts the artist’s typical relationship between rough plaster casts and clean interiors. The fixed bronze figures are deliberately both specific and enigmatic, interacting with the world at large, engaging the viewer as a voyeur. Executed with a particularly dark patina and flanked by metal traffic signs, the figures in Chance Meeting have been interpreted as three conspirators, while others have likened the arrangement to a 1950s film noir.

George Segal, having gained artistic recognition in the 1960s through his plaster sculptures, only turned to bronze in 1976 when he was offered a commission from the Government Services Administration’s Art in Public Places. Initially drawn to the “bold and wet and clean” nature of plaster, Segal was unexpectedly attracted to the malleable and sturdy nature of bronze. Casting in bronze enabled him to faithfully record individual human features. Yet, the artist employed the medium to evoke a swath of universal emotions, rather than to record his sitters’ exact anatomies. Chance Meeting, akin to many of Segal’s bronze figurations, captures an ordinary, but deeply felt human interaction for posterity.