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Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory
The beautiful catalogue that accompanies the critically-acclaimed exhibition currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum
Best known for her striking drawings of ocean surfaces, begun in 1968 and revisited over many years both in drawings and paintings, Vija Celmins (b. 1938) has been creating exquisitely detailed renderings of natural imagery for more than five decades. The oceans were followed by desert floors and night skies—all subjects in which vast, expansive distances are distilled into luminous, meticulous, and mesmerizing small-scale artworks. For Celmins, this obsessive “redescribing” of the world is a way to understand human consciousness in relation to lived experience.
The first major publication on the artist in twenty years, this comprehensive and lavishly illustrated volume explores the full range of Celmins’s work produced since the 1960s—drawings and paintings as well as sculpture and prints. Scholarly essays, a narrative chronology, and a selection of excerpts from interviews with the artist illuminate her methods and techniques; survey her early years in Los Angeles, where she was part of a circle that included James Turrell and Ken Price; and trace the development of her work after she moved to New York City and befriended figures such as Robert Gober and Richard Serra.
Published in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Exhibition San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
(12/15/18–03/31/19) Art Gallery of Ontario
(05/04/19–08/04/19) The Met Breuer, New York
(09/24/19–01/12/20)
Best known for her striking drawings of ocean surfaces, begun in 1968 and revisited over many years both in drawings and paintings, Vija Celmins (b. 1938) has been creating exquisitely detailed renderings of natural imagery for more than five decades. The oceans were followed by desert floors and night skies—all subjects in which vast, expansive distances are distilled into luminous, meticulous, and mesmerizing small-scale artworks. For Celmins, this obsessive “redescribing” of the world is a way to understand human consciousness in relation to lived experience.
The first major publication on the artist in twenty years, this comprehensive and lavishly illustrated volume explores the full range of Celmins’s work produced since the 1960s—drawings and paintings as well as sculpture and prints. Scholarly essays, a narrative chronology, and a selection of excerpts from interviews with the artist illuminate her methods and techniques; survey her early years in Los Angeles, where she was part of a circle that included James Turrell and Ken Price; and trace the development of her work after she moved to New York City and befriended figures such as Robert Gober and Richard Serra.
Published in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Exhibition San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
(12/15/18–03/31/19) Art Gallery of Ontario
(05/04/19–08/04/19) The Met Breuer, New York
(09/24/19–01/12/20)
- GenresArt
272 pages, Hardcover
Published December 11, 2018
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About the author
Ian Alteveer
14 booksIan Alteveer is Aaron I. Fleischman Curator, Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 4, 2019
Celmins's work as a painter and drawer is interesting and unique. As her career progressed, she focused more and more exclusively on two subjects from nature: ocean surfaces and night skies. It is a testament to the intense power of Celmins's art that so many such works follow upon one another in this large exhibition and manage not to feel overly repetitive, at least not to a problematic degree.
Celmins's early works were photo-realist, sometimes tromp l'oeil paintings that either depicted an inanimate object or scenes of human violence, such as car crashes and warfare. Some of these earlier paintings reminded me of the "nostalgic" images of Gerhard Richter that reflect on his childhood in Nazi Germany.
Photographs became more and more favored by Celmins as objects for her paintings and drawings. These works did not strike me as being "photo-realist" because they made such a point of depicting the photograph as an object. That images are objects, and can be turned into other objects, is perhaps the key theme of Celmins's oeuvre.
Gradually, her paintings and drawings confront the viewer more and more with their object-ness. There is a phenomenological, and also I think Bergsonian streak to her work. The images the artist sees of the world, her memories of life, confront the gaze of the other as an object. The choice of oceans and heavens as subjects seems, in hindsight, inevitable. Such subjects offer a frame onto what seems an infinite, natural openness as recreated in a small, flat, impenetrable object.
Celmins's early works were photo-realist, sometimes tromp l'oeil paintings that either depicted an inanimate object or scenes of human violence, such as car crashes and warfare. Some of these earlier paintings reminded me of the "nostalgic" images of Gerhard Richter that reflect on his childhood in Nazi Germany.
Photographs became more and more favored by Celmins as objects for her paintings and drawings. These works did not strike me as being "photo-realist" because they made such a point of depicting the photograph as an object. That images are objects, and can be turned into other objects, is perhaps the key theme of Celmins's oeuvre.
Gradually, her paintings and drawings confront the viewer more and more with their object-ness. There is a phenomenological, and also I think Bergsonian streak to her work. The images the artist sees of the world, her memories of life, confront the gaze of the other as an object. The choice of oceans and heavens as subjects seems, in hindsight, inevitable. Such subjects offer a frame onto what seems an infinite, natural openness as recreated in a small, flat, impenetrable object.
March 12, 2024
An amazing artist
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews