Vija Celmins

Vija Celmins ( ; ; ; born October 25, 1938) is a Latvian American visual artist best known for photo-realistic paintings and drawings of natural environments and phenomena such as the ocean, spider webs, star fields, and rocks. Her earlier work included pop sculptures and monochromatic representational paintings. Based in New York City, she has been the subject of over forty solo exhibitions since 1965, and major retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

Biography Vija Celmiņa was born on October 25, 1938, in Riga, Latvia. Upon the Soviet occupation of Latvia in 1940, during World War II, her parents fled with her and her older sister Inta to Germany, then under the Nazi regime; after the end of the war, the family lived in a United Nations supported Latvian refugee camp in Esslingen am Neckar, Baden-Württemberg. In 1948, the Church World Service relocated the family to the United States, briefly in New York City, then in Indianapolis, Indiana. Sponsored by a local Lutheran church, Vija was ten, and spoke no English, which caused her to focus on drawing, leading her teachers to encourage further creativity and painting.

In 1955, she entered the John Herron School of Art in Indianapolis, where she has said that for the first time in her life, she did not feel like an outsider. She lived in Venice until 1980, painting and sculpting, and working as an instructor at the California State University, Los Angeles, the University of California, Irvine and California Institute of the Arts, in Valencia.

In 1981, following an invitation to teach at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, she moved permanently to New York City, wanting to be closer to the artists and art that she liked. She also returned to painting, which she had abandoned for twelve years, working during that time mainly in pencil. She later used woodcuts, and eraser and charcoal. Since that time, she has worked out of a cottage in Sag Harbor, New York, and a studio loft on Crosby Street in Soho, Manhattan. During the 1980s, she also taught at the Cooper Union and the Yale University School of Art.

Work

Working in California in the 1960s, Vija Celmins' early work, generally in photorealistic painting and pop-inspired sculpture, was representational. She recreated commonplace objects such as TVs, lamps, pencils, erasers and the painted monochrome reproductions of photographs. A common underlying theme in the paintings was violence or conflict, such as war planes, handguns and riot imagery. A retrospective of the 1964–1966 work was organized by the Menil Collection in cooperation with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2010. She has cited Malcolm Morley and Jasper Johns as influences in this period.

In the late 1960s through the 1970s, she abandoned painting, and focused on working in graphite pencil, creating highly detailed photorealistic drawings, based on photographs of natural elements such as the ocean's or Moon's surface, the insides of shells, and closeups of rocks. Critics frequently compare her laborious approach to contemporaries Chuck Close and Gerhard Richter, and she has cited Giorgio Morandi, a master of the pale grey still life, as a major influence. with eleven examples held at MoMA. By 1981, she returned to painting, from this point forward working also with woodcuts and printing, and substantially in charcoal with a wide variety of erasers - often exploring negative space, selectively removing darkness from images, By 2000, she had begun to produce haunting and distinctive spider webs, again negative images in oil or charcoal, to much critical acclaim, with particular note of her meticulous surface development and luminosity. She has said that all these works are based on photographs, and she imparts substantial effort on the built-up surfaces of the images.

Critics have often noted that Celmins' works since the late 1960s - the moon scapes, ocean surfaces, star fields, shells, and spider webs, often share the characteristic of not having a reference point: no horizon, depth of field, edge or landmarks to put them into context. The location, constellation, or scientific name are all unknown - there is no information imparted.

From 2008, Celmins returned to objects and representative work, with paintings of maps and books, as well as many uses of small graphite tablets - hand held black boards. She recently released a new series of prints that includes both night sky and waves mezzotints. These prints were exhibited at the Matthew Marks Gallery in January, February, and March 2018 and the Senior & Shopmaker Gallery in February and March 2018.

Her woodcuts of water can take a year to cut; she has commented that they "remind us of 'the complexity of the simplest things'".

Solo exhibitions Celmins's works have been the subject of over forty solo exhibitions around the world since 1966 (Los Angeles), hundreds of group exhibitions. After her longtime dealer, McKee Gallery in New York, announced its closing in 2015, Celmins is currently represented by Matthew Marks Gallery. Between 1992 and 1994, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, organized the artist's mid-career retrospective. The show traveled to the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In 2023, the Kunsthalle Hamburg hosted the exhibition Vija Celmnis | Gerhard Richter. Double Vision (12 May 2023 - 27 August 2023), featuring a dialogue between the two artists.

Notable works in public collections

Heater (1964) Whitney Museum, New York Torso (1964), Menil Collection, Houston House #1 (1965), Museum of Modern Art, New York Forest Fire (1965-1966), Glenstone, Potomac, Maryland Flying Fortress (1966), Museum of Modern Art, New York German Plane (1966), Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas Pencil (1966), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Suspended Plane (1966), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Tulip Car #1 (1966), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Untitled (Double Moon Surface) (1969), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Untitled (Ocean) (1969), Philadelphia Museum of Art Untitled (Cassiopeia) (1973), Baltimore Museum of Art Untitled (Medium Desert) (1974-1975), Menil Collection, Houston Untitled (Comb) (1978), Los Angeles County Museum of Art To Fix the Image in Memory (1977-1982), Museum of Modern Art, New York Alliance (1982), High Museum of Art, Atlanta Strata (1983), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Untitled (Comet) (1988), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Night Sky #12 (1995-1996), Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh Night Sky #19 (1998), Tate, London Untitled #17 (1998), Centre Pompidou, Paris Night Sky #20 (1999), Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Winterthur, Switzerland Night Sky #17 (2000-2001), Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas Blackboard Tableau #1 (2007-2010), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Blackboard Tableau #14 (2011-2015), Glenstone, Potomac, Maryland

In 2005, a major collector of her work, real estate developer Edward R. Broida, donated 17 pieces, covering 40 years of her career, to the Museum of Modern Art, as part of an overall contribution valued at $50 million ($50,000,000). Especially noteworthy were the early and late paintings.

Awards 1961: Fellowship to Yale University Summer Session 1968: Cassandra Foundation Award 1997: Skowhegan Medal for Painting 1997: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship 2004 Elected into the National Academy of Design 2006: RISD Athena Award for Excellence in Painting 2009: Roswitha Haftmann Prize 2009: Fellow Award in the Visual Arts from United States Artists 2021: Honoree of the Great Immigrants Award, Carnegie Corporation of New York