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Charles Seliger: Biomorphic Drawings, 1944-1947

June 5 – August 22, 1997


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Installation Views - Charles Seliger: Biomorphic Drawings, 1944-1947 - June 5 – August 22, 1997 - Exhibitions
Installation Views - Charles Seliger: Biomorphic Drawings, 1944-1947 - June 5 – August 22, 1997 - Exhibitions
Installation Views - Charles Seliger: Biomorphic Drawings, 1944-1947 - June 5 – August 22, 1997 - Exhibitions


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Charles Seliger: Biomorphic Drawings, 1944-1947 is a solo exhibition - the artist's fifth at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery - which focuses on a group of eighteen drawings executed between 1944 and 1947 that offer a “glimpse into a world that might appear actually to exist under some high-powered microscope.” Each drawing is small in scale, 12” x 16”, and carefully rendered with india ink, watercolor and tempera. The provocative images represent organic forms that emerged out of the artist’s unconscious mind suggesting human organs, amoebas, and animal skeletons. The works are untitled and resonate the artist’s interest in the Surrealist technique of automatism.

Charles Seliger began exhibiting his work in 1942 and had his first of two solo exhibitions at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery in 1945. These exhibitions featured abstractions similar to the biomorphic drawings included in this exhibition. For more than fifty years, Seliger has passionately pursued his inner-world of organic abstraction developing and refining his meticulous and obsessive interpretation of nature in small scale works.

Charles Seliger has actively exhibited in the United States and abroad and is represented in numerous public collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, New York, National Museum of American Art, Washinton, DC, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. His first major one-person museum show was in 1949 at the DeYoung Memorial Museum, San Francisco and he was given a retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in 1986, at which time the Guggenheim Museum acquired more than twenty of his paintings.

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is the exclusive representative of Charles Seliger.