Vija Celmins

by Vija Celmins (Artist), Julia Friedrich (Editor), Kasper König (Editor)

The many admirers and devotees of Vija Celmins (born 1938) at last possess a serious overview of the Latvian-born, New York-based artist's work in this volume. For more than a half-century, Celmins has quietly mined a narrow but infinitely rich range of theme and palette, extrapolating whole worlds of photorealist detail from four seemingly simple the surface of the sea, the night sky, the desert and the spider web. In oil paintings, prints and charcoal or graphite pencil drawings that revisit these motifs over and over, as if researching them to comprehend their infinities of detail, Celmins confines herself to the colors black, white and gray, preserving a spacious sobriety and calm exactitude for her potentially romantic subjects. This essential volume reproduces more than 60 variations of Celmins' precisely depicted seas, skies, deserts and webs, which in the artist's seemingly dispassionate renderings restore vastness and wonder to our sense of the cosmos.

Genres: Art

152 pages, Hardcover

First published July 31, 2011

About the author

American painter, sculptor, object-maker and draughtswoman, of Latvian birth. In 1944 her family fled to eastern Germany, eventually settling near Esslingen am Neckar (Baden-Württemberg) in the west. In 1948 they moved to the USA, staying briefly in New York before resettling in Indianapolis. Celmins studied painting at the John Herron School of Art in Indianapolis (1955–62) and regularly visited New York to see the work of the Abstract Expressionists. After attending the summer session at Yale University, New Haven, where she met a strong community of students and artists, she decided to become a painter (1961). She then attended the University of California, Los Angeles (1962–5). From 1966 Celmins took photographs as subjects for paintings. In painted and drawn works since 1968 she drew upon photographs from books, magazines and those taken by herself, including views of the sea, desert and constellations.

Reviews

[Karen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wanted to like this book more. Bob Nickas' essay failed to generate new ideas or thoughts for me. Or I failed to grasp what he was trying to convey... It failed to help me understand her process better.

There were three paragraphs when he is discussing To Fix the Image in Memory that were engrossing, but overall...

[Michael Vagnetti · Rating 3 out of 5]

While the reproductions of Celmins's art in this catalog are probably too small to outdo other the Phaidon or ICA monographs, the two essays are concise and essential.

Friedrich's discusses her use of grey as a positing of mental space; drawing as thinking, and evidence of thinking; putting photographic images back in the real world to confront them; the relationship between nature and art; and the achievement of complexity through simplicity.

The König essay reminds us that Celmins's stance is not subjective, not symbolic, unbounded, not socially constructed, ambivalent between abstraction and realism, and centered on overt materiality and the process of making of manually transformed pictorial realities.

"She is interested in both the scientific image, such as of a night sky or a spider's web that she finds in magazines, as well as in the surfaces she photographs of the ocean and the deserts of California. These are 'impossible images,' as the artist herself calls them. 'I like to work with impossible images, impossible because they are nonspecific, too big, spaces unbound. I make them specific by taking this vast thing and wrestling it into the painting.' "

"In Celmins' work there are always the two: the instant and eternity, the now and the delay, the primal image and the copy, the figure and its abstraction, the motif and its technical mediation. She does not simply place abstract results before the viewer but shows how they were arrived at. She mediates mediation so that it becomes comprehensible how a painting could develop from a starry night and an etching from an astonished gaze."