Charles Seliger

Charles Seliger began his career in the mid-1940s as the youngest American artist to exhibit at Peggy Guggenheim's gallery in New York, together with Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and William Baziotes. Influenced by Surrealism, Seliger developed a form of organic abstraction based on natural forms. In the mid-1950s the notions of 'particle' and 'structure' became central to his art, which evolved toward the elaboration of forms constructed of minute, endless elements. The unusually large "Interior of a Landscape" presents Seliger's typical accumulation of meticulously drawn details to suggest the inner structures of plants and other natural objects. "My pictures are in a sense all interiors or intimate views," he wrote in his journal in 1956. Seliger does not so much reproduce natural forms as he imagines them, stimulated by his readings in physics, biology, and natural history.