Page 3 - OSG: Lincoln Seligman: 2023
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Lincoln Seligman  Seligman stands shoulder-to-shoulder with these
        wizards of space exploration - his mobiles turn
        gracefully in the upper levels of the City, in the
 Lincoln Seligman’s colour-drenched celebrations of
 place and people take us across the globe, but in this  Swires and Cathay buildings in Hong Kong, and his
 exhibition we are mainly in India.  three-dimensional murals articulate the atria of
        many airports, hotels and banks whose
 Seligman finds colour everywhere, as a lucky bee  skyscrapers prick world cities’ skylines.
 finds pollen. His Pondicherry is pink; his Jodhpur
        While these grand works were proceeding,
 crimson; his Varanasi, the funeral city on the Ganges,
 flickers in reds and golds that catch the eye and  Seligman was beginning to capture the magic of
 confront mortality.  the paintbrush and the colours it could command.
        Following his tremendous leap between maritime
 Seligman did not go to art school, but trained as
        law and flights of defiance against architectural
 a lawyer and came to specialise in the law of the
        gravity, we may come to see Seligman’s further
 world’s shipping and seaways.
        leap into paintings of modest domestic scale and
 From handling those large purses and high quarrels  high colour as a wholly predictable event.
 something in him flipped, and Seligman, then in his
        His forts and palaces of India soften in the light,
 thirties, moved into big-budget buildings, not as a
        his abstract swathes of turban-cloth weave across
 lawyer but as the designer of the kind of elegant
 plaza artworks that demanded an instinctive  the picture-plane, while his panoply of orange
 understanding of volume and colour. Their scale   and vermilion carpets, and the cushioned contours
 also demanded a good grasp of contract law.  of a dusty ochre dawn, all catch the eye and warm
        the heart. No art school could have contained
 The giant relief sculptures he made in the 1980s   Lincoln Seligman.
 and 1990s share Broadgate’s space in London with
 grand masters of scale such as Jim Dine, Richard  He has chosen a freedom to roam far from the
 Serra and Allen Jones, while his space-devouring  well-padded tracks of an orthodox art career,
 mobiles give a nod to Alexander Calder.  and to follow his own compass bearings.
                                   James Hamilton, 2023
 Cover: Pondicherry Red, acrylic on canvas, 28 x 40 cm
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