Early Life
Charles Ginnever was born in San Mateo, California, in 1931. In 1953 he went to Paris, where he attended classes taught by the sculptor Ossip Zadkine at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. His European tour lasted two years, during which time he travelled throughout France and Italy and absorbed as much as he could from the many museums he visited. Upon returning to his native California, he enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts, (now the San Francisco Art Institute) where he studied photography and sculpture from 1955 to 1957, and where he befriended the sculptor Peter Forakis.
1957 was a pivotal year for Ginnever, when he drove from San Francisco to New York with fellow sculptor Mark di Suvero. On the week-long journey cross-country, Ginnever and di Suvero spent their time discussing abstract expressionism and concluded that sculpture, "hadn't matched the accomplishments in painting", and they were determined to correct that. Dropping di Suvero off in New York City, Ginnever continued on to Cornell University, where he had accepted a teaching position and where he simultaneously completed his MFA in 1959. It was during this period that Ginnever, inspired by calligraphy, made such seminal works as Oxbow, Calligraph and Ithaca, all incorporating found materials such as wood, railroad ties and steel, that not only marked his departure from the "carve-direct/modeling orientation to sculpture" from which he and di Suvero initially evolved, but paved the way to a new form of sculptural expression where sculpture not only occupied space but, according to Carter Ratcliff, did so by "reaching into it". This would prove to be the defining moment in Ginnever's career when his sculpture would eliminate its reliance on the pedestal or base.
After the incorporation of found, bent steel pieces in his railroad tie sculpture of 1959 entitled Ithaca, started while still at Cornell and completed when Ginnever moved to New York City, steel became the primary medium for his work, and has remained so ever since.
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