Charles Seliger
For almost sixty years, Charles Seliger (American, b.1926) has passionately pursued an inner-world of organic abstraction, celebrating the structural complexities of natural forms. Like many artists of his generation, Seliger was deeply influenced by the Surrealists' use of automatism, and throughout his career he has cultivated a deeply poetic style of abstraction that explores the relationship of order and chaos found in nature. Attracted to the inner structures of plants, insects and other natural objects, and inspired by a wide range of reading in natural history, biology and physics, Seliger's abstractions pay homage to nature's infinite variety. His paintings have been described as 'microscopic views of the natural world,' and although the references to nature and science are appropriate, his abstractions do not directly imitate nature so much as suggest its intrinsic structures.
Seliger was born in New York City, but raised in Jersey City, New Jersey, and spent his teenage years making frequent trips to New York to view museum and gallery exhibitions. Although he never completed high school or received formal art training, Seliger immersed himself in the history of art and experimented with different painting styles including Pointillism, Cubism, and Surrealism. In 1943 Seliger became friends with Jimmy Ernst, and was quickly drawn into the circle of avant-garde artists championed by Howard Putzel and Peggy Guggenheim. In 1945, at the age of nineteen, Seliger was included in Putzel's seminal exhibition A Problem for Critics at 67 Gallery, and had his first solo exhibition at Guggenheim's legendary Art of This Century gallery. At this time, Seliger was the youngest artist exhibiting with members of Abstract Expressionist movement, and he was only twenty years old when the Museum of Modern Art acquired his painting, Natural History: Form within Rock (1946), for the permanent collection.
Seliger had his first major museum exhibition in 1949 at the De Young Memorial Museum, and from the 1950s to the present he has had over 40 solo exhibitions at prestigious galleries in New York City and abroad, including Willard Gallery and Galerie Lopes AG in Zürich. While exhibiting with Willard Gallery, Seliger formed close friendships with Mark Tobey, Lyonel Feininger, and Norman Lewis. In 1986, Seliger was given his first retrospective exhibition at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which now holds the largest collection of his work. In addition to the Guggenheim, he is represented in numerous museum collections, including The British Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, Wadsworth Atheneum, and Whitney Museum of American Art.
Today, Seliger is primarily known for his meticulously detailed, small-scale abstractions. He uses a variety of self-invented techniques to cover the surfaces of Masonite panels with layer upon layer of acrylic paint, often sanding or scraping each layer to create texture. He then uses a fine brush to delineate the natural forms embedded within the layers of pigment. This labor-intensive technique results in ethereal paintings that give form to elements of the natural world that cannot be perceived by the naked eye. Now in his seventy-seventh year, Seliger is the 2003 recipient of the Lee Krasner Award, granted by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, in recognition of his long and illustrious career in the arts. (Source: The Michael Rosenfeld Gallery,
