Jonathan Seliger

JONATHAN SELIGER ( United States, 1955).
"Gucci".
Gilded bronze.
With losses in the corners and damage.
Signed on the base.
Measurements: 71 x 91 x 31 cm.
In this piece, the artist reproduces with extraordinary formal precision a Gucci bag, thus conveying a message associated with luxury consumption and transforming an everyday and apparently ephemeral object into a durable sculpture. The industrial finish allows the texture, color and folds of the paper to be imitated with great fidelity, so that the work produces a perceptive play between appearance and materiality.
Seliger's artistic practice is part of the Pop Art tradition, which since the 1960s has used images and objects from everyday life and mass culture as raw material for art. In his case, the focus is particularly on the emblems of high-end consumerism. The artist has created numerous sculptures that reproduce bags of brands such as Prada, Chanel or Bulgari. By transferring these objects into the sculptural realm through a complex fabrication process, Seliger creates an ironic contrast between the refined aesthetics of luxury and the heavy, permanent materiality of bronze. His extreme attention to finish and surface also evokes the movement known as finish fetish, which emerged on the West Coast of the United States and emphasized technical perfection and industrial finishes in sculpture.
Jonathan Seliger was born in 1955 in the United States and developed his artistic training at the State University of New York at Binghamton, where he received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn and Columbia County, New York. Seliger has developed a solid international career with more than thirty solo exhibitions and extensive participation in group exhibitions in museums and art centers. Among the institutions that have shown his work are the Schaufler Foundation in Germany, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in California, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, the Phoenix Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, among others. His work is also part of important international public collections, such as those of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the Walker Art Center.