For more information, please contact us at:
contact@charles-seliger.org

About the Trust

Rights & Reproductions

The copyright for all works by Charles Seliger resides with the Charles M. Seliger Trust. All requests concerning the use of images of Seliger and his works must be addressed to the Trust.

Please email contact@charles-seliger.org and include all necessary information for understanding your project.

Holdings

The Trust Art Collection includes works by Seliger from all decades of his painting life, from the 1940’s to the 2000’s.

The Trust Archive includes documents and images related to the artist’s life and work, including correspondence, photographs, exhibition catalogs and reference materials.

Note to Collectors

The Charles M. Seliger Trust does not authenticate works of art nor do we provide assistance with any form of authentication.

Note to Researchers

For access to the Trust Archive materials by qualified scholars, art historians or curators, please contact the Trust by emailing contact@charles-seliger.org.

Representation

The Charles M. Seliger Trust is represented by Hollis Taggart NYC.

Letter From the Trustees

From the sub-atomic to the inter-galactic, the universe is composed of complex structures with infinite detail. If not otherwise told, it can be hard to discern between the fractal image of a cell and the radio telescope image of a star nebula. Challenging though it may be to understand such imagery, it is even more difficult to invent it from our imaginations. Yet this is what Charles Seliger did with facility and conviction in his art.

Seliger did not have a formal education in mathematics or the sciences, but through his extensive readings he absorbed the essence underlying all of nature – complexity, structure and detail. Relying solely on his imagination coupled with an intense discipline to transcribe what he imagined into images we can all see, Seliger invented his own interpretations of nature.

Many of Seliger's paintings pre-date the technology that eventually allowed us to see nature up close and at a distance, yet what he imagined was prescient. He saw what we would all eventually see.

Often artists are renowned for the scale and boldness of their works. Large paintings and large brush strokes convey emotion and intensity. Seliger took an entirely different approach. He perfected intimacy and small scale to introduce us to spaces and places whose size and dimensions are not relevant.

As if mimicking the protracted natural processes that give rise to structure, complexity and detail, Seliger carefully created his works in an artistic timeframe that might also be considered protracted. Each morsel of paint that was added, or removed, by hand, from his art came or went for a reason. For the big worlds, and the little worlds, that he created, Seliger was the architect, the designer, the planner, the father.

Seliger passed in 2009. Since then, his life and his art have largely been out of public view. Recently the Charles M. Seliger Trust was established to reintroduce the world to Charles Seliger. We hope that in exploring this website you will come to understand that the art of painting is about, and has always been about, artists speaking to the world by showing us what they see, even when what they see is not directly in front of them. We are all fortunate that Seliger not only saw things in unique ways, but that he took the time to craft what he saw in ways that we too can see.