Born To Shop by Jonathan Seliger

Born to Shop by Jonathan Seliger

Jonathan Seliger’s neo-Pop sculptures and installations from Born to Shop provide viewers with a compelling re-contextualization of familiar, everyday objects such as recognizably-branded shopping bags. The whimsical nature of Jonathan Seliger’s Born to Shop belies the sculptor’s meticulous and highly detailed technical approach to its creation.

Born in 1955, Jonathan Seliger graduated from the State University of New York at Binghamton in the year 1978, with a Bachelor of Arts degree.  Since his first solo exhibition in the year 1993, his work has been shown extensively in galleries and museums throughout the world.  His neo-Pop sculptures and installations provide viewers with a compelling re-contextualization of familiar, everyday objects such as traffic barriers and recognizably-branded shopping bags.  The often-whimsical nature of Seliger’s work belies the sculptor’s meticulous and highly detailed technical approach to its creation.

Hermes Shopping Bag by Jonathan Seliger

Seliger roots his visual vocabulary in contemporary and 20th Century art historical precedents; combining ideas about scale, seriality, and fabrication, prevalent in minimalism, together with the content of pop art, and an attention to detail and surface quality on par with west coast finish fetish practitioners. His use of language, the naming of artworks and show titles for example, adds still other dimensions to the work, an element of humor or social critique.

Jonathan Seliger’s Born to Shop is uniquely hand-crafted and succeeds in creating the illusion of having been mass-produced, thus bringing an echo of consumerism into the traditionally rarified environment of fine art gallery and museum.