Shlomo Selinger Art for Sale at Auction

Sculptor, Figure sculptor

Shelomo Selinger (born May 31, 1928) is a sculptor and artist living and working in Paris since 1956.

Selinger was born to a Jewish family in the small Polish town of Szczakowa (today part of Jaworzno) near Oswiecim (Auschwitz[1]). He received both a traditional Jewish upbringing and a Polish public school education. In 1943 he was deported with his father from the Chrzanów ghetto to the Faulbrück concentration camp in Germany. Three months later his father was murdered and Selinger remained alone in the camp. His mother and one of his sisters also perished during the Holocaust. Selinger survived nine German death camps: Faulbrück, Gröditz, Markstadt, Fünfteichen, Gross-Rosen, Flossenburg, Dresden, Leitmeritz and finally Theresienstadt, as well as two death marches.

He was discovered, still breathing, on a stack of dead bodies when the Terezin camp was liberated in 1945 by the Red Army. The Jewish military doctor who pulled him out of the pile of corpses transferred him to a military field hospital, where he recovered his health, but was completely amnesic for seven years.

In 1946 he boarded the Tel Haï, a ship leaving La Ciotat and headed to the then British Mandate Palestine with a group of young death camps survivors who, with the help of the Jewish Brigade of the British Army, had crossed illegally through Germany, Belgium and France. The ship was seized outside the territorial waters of Haifa by the British Royal Navy. The passengers, none of whom had immigration certificates, were interned in the Atlit detainee camp.

After his liberation from the camp, Selinger joined the Beit HaArava kibbutz near the Dead Sea. During the 1948 Palestine war he participated in the Sodom battle, while his kibbutz was destroyed. He was then one of the founders of the Kabri kibbutz in the Galilee, where in 1951 he met his future wife, Ruth Shapirovsky, who came to the kibbutz as a volunteer worker with her Haifa high school class. They were married in 1954. At that time Selinger began to fill in the gaps in his memory and to sculpt.

In 1955 Selinger was awarded the Norman Prize of the America-Israel Cultural Foundation. A year later he enrolled in Paris at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts where he studied traditional clay modelling with Marcel Gimond. However, he did not abandon his own personal style and continued carving directly on working materials with hammers, sledgehammers and chisels.

Too poor to buy his own art materials, Selinger hunted for stone blocks in the slum belt of Paris and returned with a very dense and hard bloc of granite capable of capturing and reflecting light. Granite became his favourite stone. Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncu?i introduced him to Vosges' sandstone ("Grès des Vosges") and gave him a grindstone of this reddish stone, a symbolic present to Selinger as a successor to Brâncu?i's direct carving technique. Selinger also carved wood, mostly using easily available firewood.

After three years in the Beaux Arts school, Selinger started attending what he called the "best school of all", the museums of Paris (primarily the Louvre) and the studios of Parisian sculptors including Ossip Zadkine, Jean Arp, Alberto Giacometti and Joseph Constant. A sculpture named "Motherhood", inspired by his wife and the birth of their son Rami, earned him the Neumann Prize of the city of Geneva, the first acknowledgement of his talent in Paris. The work is now part of the permanent collection of the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Thus Selinger—a survivor of the German death camps—became a renowned sculptor of birth, rebirth and life itself.

The Jewish Museum of New York discovered Selinger in 1960 and displayed seven of his sculptures. After Paris art gallery owner Michel Dauberville became owner of his parents’ gallery, the Galerie Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, he gave many exhibitions of Selinger's work from the 1960s through the first decade of the 21st century.

Further recognition came to Selinger in 1973 when he won first prize in an international competition with his monument "The Gates of Hell", in memory of those who passed through Drancy internment camp on the outskirts of Paris during World War II.

In 1973 Selinger was named Chevalier to the prestigious French Legion of Honour by President François Mitterrand. Since 2006, he has had the title "Officier de la Légion d'Honneur".

Currently living in Paris with his wife, Selinger contributes to work in marble, granite, stone and wood.