"To sketch his achievement: he released sculpture from the right-angled--in other words, architectural--premises that have enclosed it since antiquity. Having freed sculptural form, he gave it the force of human gesture, at a monumental scale. Thus he has a connection to the heroic, gestural painters of the Abstract Expressionist generation, yet his forms are his own. Rather than recapitulate Abstract Expressionism in three-dimensions, he reinvented it on terms entirely his own. He found a future for the heroic gesture, and he is still doing it. A major achievement."

Carter Ratcliff

"Charles Ginnever has been under-appreciated by critics, but he is an artist who has created a unique body of work that pulls us toward a visceral understanding of the nature of visual perception. Rooted in Japanese and Eastern teachings, Ginnever constructs large scale sculptures that must be experienced in situ. As the viewer moves around one of his elegant yet powerful metal constructions the landscape becomes the "other element" in the work. A variety of vistas are framed while the form of the sculpture itself morphs Rashomon-like into different shapes-- thereby underscoring the subjective nature of the way we see. Ginnever's multi-positional, interactive work plays against complacent visual tendencies, as the artist has noted, 'using traditional means to challenge atrophied habits of perception.'"

Deborah Rothschild, Ph.D.
Senior Curator Emerita, Williams College Museum of Art