Page 2 - OSG: Lincoln Seligman: 2023

Lincoln Seligman Seligman stands shoulder-to-shoulder with these
Lincoln Seligman’s colour-drenched celebrations of
place and people take us across the globe, but in this
exhibition we are mainly in India.
Seligman finds colour everywhere, as a lucky bee
finds pollen. His Pondicherry is pink; his Jodhpur
crimson; his Varanasi, the funeral city on the Ganges,
flickers in reds and golds that catch the eye and
confront mortality.
Seligman did not go to art school, but trained as
a lawyer and came to specialise in the law of the
world’s shipping and seaways.
From handling those large purses and high quarrels
something in him flipped, and Seligman, then in his
thirties, moved into big-budget buildings, not as a
lawyer but as the designer of the kind of elegant
plaza artworks that demanded an instinctive
understanding of volume and colour. Their scale
also demanded a good grasp of contract law.
The giant relief sculptures he made in the 1980s
and 1990s share Broadgate’s space in London with
grand masters of scale such as Jim Dine, Richard
Serra and Allen Jones, while his space-devouring
mobiles give a nod to Alexander Calder.
Cover: Pondicherry Red, acrylic on canvas, 28 x 40 cm
wizards of space exploration - his mobiles turn
gracefully in the upper levels of the City, in the
Swires and Cathay buildings in Hong Kong, and his
three-dimensional murals articulate the atria of
many airports, hotels and banks whose
skyscrapers prick world cities’ skylines.
While these grand works were proceeding,
Seligman was beginning to capture the magic of
the paintbrush and the colours it could command.
Following his tremendous leap between maritime
law and flights of defiance against architectural
gravity, we may come to see Seligman’s further
leap into paintings of modest domestic scale and
high colour as a wholly predictable event.
His forts and palaces of India soften in the light,
his abstract swathes of turban-cloth weave across
the picture-plane, while his panoply of orange
and vermilion carpets, and the cushioned contours
of a dusty ochre dawn, all catch the eye and warm
the heart. No art school could have contained
Lincoln Seligman.
He has chosen a freedom to roam far from the
well-padded tracks of an orthodox art career,
and to follow his own compass bearings.
James Hamilton, 2023