Charles Seliger was born on June 3, 1926, in New York. Due to his parents’ divorce, he spent his childhood with his mother in Jersey City, New Jersey, often traveling to New York to visit museums and galleries. Despite not completing secondary school or receiving a traditional artistic education, Seliger was passionate about art from an early age, practising and experimenting with diverse techniques and styles. At only sixteen years of age, he entered the Painters and Sculptors Society of New Jersey where he showed his work for the first time in 1942. In 1943, through his friendship with Jimmy Ernst, he was able to deepen his knowledge of Surrealism and abstract art and swiftly joined the circle of artists who gravitated around Howard Putzel and Peggy Guggenheim.

In 1945 he took part in the A Problem for Critics exhibition organized by Putzel at the 67 Gallery in New York, exhibiting alongside artists such as Arshile Gorky, Hans Hofmann, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. In November of the same year, Peggy Guggenheim organized his first solo exhibition in her museum-gallery, Art of This Century, in New York. During this period, the practice of automatism, typically employed by the Surrealists, influenced him to create paintings populated with organic and biomorphic forms which resulted in personal, organic spaces. In the decades which followed, the artist continued to develop his practice of automatism, experimenting with various materials and techniques. He perceived a necessity to translate the world’s fundamental forms or new scientific theories through images.

During the 1950’s his work was consistently shown at prestigious galleries, including the Willard Gallery of New York, where he formed friendships with Lyonel Feininger, Norman Lewis, and Mark Tobey. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, which at that time possessed the most comprehensive collection of his work, organized the first Seliger retrospective in 1986. In 2003 he was awarded the Lee Krasner Lifetime Achievement Award from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Seliger died in New York on October 1, 2009.