Vija Celmins
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Vija Celmins (pronounced VEE-ya SELL-muns;Hilarie M. Sheets and Randy Kennedy (September 24, 2015)

''
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lv, Vija Celmiņa, pronounced TSEL-meen-ya) 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
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, she has been the subject of over forty solo exhibitions since 1965, and major retrospectives at the
Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of ...
,
Whitney Museum of American Art The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), ...
,
Los Angeles County Museum of Art The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile, Los Angeles, California, Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits (George C. Pa ...
,
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern and contemporary art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art, and was ...
,
Institute of Contemporary Arts The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) is an artistic and cultural centre on The Mall in London, just off Trafalgar Square. Located within Nash House, part of Carlton House Terrace, near the Duke of York Steps and Admiralty Arch, the ICA c ...
, 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 World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
, her parents fled with her and her older sister Inta to Germany, then under the
Nazi Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in ...
regime; after the end of the war, the family lived in a United Nations supported Latvian refugee camp in Esslingen am Neckar,
Baden-Württemberg Baden-Württemberg (; ), commonly shortened to BW or BaWü, is a German state () in Southwest Germany, east of the Rhine, which forms the southern part of Germany's western border with France. With more than 11.07 million inhabitants across a ...
. In 1948, the Church World Service relocated the family to the
United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...
, briefly in New York City, then in
Indianapolis, Indiana Indianapolis (), colloquially known as Indy, is the state capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Indiana and the seat of Marion County. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the consolidated population of Indianapolis and Mari ...
. Sponsored by a local Lutheran church, her father found work as a carpenter, and her mother in a hospital laundry. 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. In 1961 she won a Fellowship to attend a Summer session at
Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...
, where she met
Chuck Close Charles Thomas Close (July 5, 1940 – August 19, 2021) was an American painter, visual artist, and photographer who made massive-scale photorealist and abstract portraits of himself and others. Close also created photo portraits using a very l ...
and
Brice Marden Brice Marden (born October 15, 1938) is an American artist generally described as Minimalist, although his work may be hard to categorize. He lives and works in New York City; Tivoli, New York; Hydra, Greece; and Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania. Life ...
, who would remain close friends. It was during this time she began to study Italian monotone still life painter Giorgio Morandi, and painted abstract works. In 1962 she graduated from Herron with a BFA, and moved to Venice, Los Angeles, to pursue an MFA at the
University of California at Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a Normal school, teachers colle ...
, graduating in 1965. At UCLA, she enjoyed freedom, being far from her parents, leading to further artistic exploration. 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 The University of California, Irvine (UCI or UC Irvine) is a public land-grant research university in Irvine, California. One of the ten campuses of the University of California system, UCI offers 87 undergraduate degrees and 129 graduate and pr ...
and California Institute of the Arts, in Valencia. In 1981, following an invitation to teach at the
Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture is an artists residency located in Madison, Maine, just outside of Skowhegan. Every year, the program accepts online applications from emerging artists from November through January, and selects 65 t ...
, 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
woodcut Woodcut is a relief printing technique in printmaking. An artist carves an image into the surface of a block of wood—typically with gouges—leaving the printing parts level with the surface while removing the non-printing parts. Areas that ...
s, 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
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,
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. During the 1980s, she also taught at the
Cooper Union The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (Cooper Union) is a private college at Cooper Square in New York City. Peter Cooper founded the institution in 1859 after learning about the government-supported École Polytechnique in ...
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 Malcolm A. Morley (June 7, 1931 – June 1, 2018) was a British-American artist and painter. He was known as an artist who pioneered in varying styles, working as a photorealist and an expressionist, among many other styles. Life Morley was ...
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 Charles Thomas Close (July 5, 1940 – August 19, 2021) was an American painter, visual artist, and photographer who made massive-scale photorealist and abstract portraits of himself and others. Close also created photo portraits using a very l ...
and
Gerhard Richter Gerhard Richter (; born 9 February 1932) is a German visual artist. Richter has produced abstract as well as photorealistic paintings, and also photographs and glass pieces. He is widely regarded as one of the most important contemporary German ...
, and she has cited Giorgio Morandi, a master of the pale grey still life, as a major influence. These works also share with Richter's an apparent randomness and thus apparently dispassionate attitude. It is as if any photograph would do as a source for a painting, and the choice is apparently unimportant. This is of course not the case, but the work contains within it the impression that the image is chosen at random from an endless selection of possible alternative images of similar nature. At the end of this period, from 1976 to 1983, Celmins also returned to sculpture in a way that incorporated her interest in photorealism. She produced a series of bronze cast, acrylic painted stones, exact replicas of individual stones she found along the Rio Grande in Northern New Mexico, 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, and achieving subtle control of grey tones. From the early 1980s forward, Celmins focused on the constellations, moon and oceans using these various techniques, a balance between the abstract and photorealism. 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. In a 1996 review of her 30-year retrospective at London's Institute of Contemporary Art, ''The Independent'' cited her as "American art's best-kept secret." 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 also produced series prints of her now well-known waves, spiderwebs, shells and desert floors, many of which were exhibited at the McKee Gallery in June 2010. 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'".


Exhibitions

Celmins's works have been the subject of over forty solo exhibitions around the world since 1965, 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 Matthew Marks is an art gallery located in the New York City neighborhood of Chelsea and the Los Angeles neighborhood of West Hollywood. Founded in 1991 by Matthew Marks, it specializes in modern and contemporary painting, sculpture, photography, ...
.


Notable works in public collections

*''Heater'' (1964) Whitney Museum,
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*''Torso'' (1964), Menil Collection,
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*''House #1'' (1965),
Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of ...
, New York *''Forest Fire'' (1965-1966),
Glenstone Glenstone is a private contemporary art museum in Potomac, Maryland, from downtown Washington, D.C. The museum's exhibitions are drawn from a collection of about 1,300 works from post-World War II artists around the world. It is the largest priv ...
, Potomac, Maryland *''Explosion at Sea'' (1966),
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*''Flying Fortress'' (1966), Museum of Modern Art, New York *''German Plane'' (1966),
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (widely referred to as The Modern) is an art museum of post-World War II art in Fort Worth, Texas with a collection of international modern and contemporary art. Founded in 1892, The Modern is located in the c ...
,
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*''Pencil'' (1966),
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,
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*''Suspended Plane'' (1966),
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*''Tulip Car #1'' (1966), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. *''Untitled (Double Moon Surface'' (1969), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
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, Washington, D.C. *''Untitled (Ocean)'' (1969),
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*''Untitled (Cassiopeia)'' (1973), Baltimore Museum of Art *''Untitled (Medium Desert)'' (1974-1975), Menil Collection, Houston *''Untitled (Comb)'' (1978),
Los Angeles County Museum of Art The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile, Los Angeles, California, Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits (George C. Pa ...
*''To Fix the Image in Memory'' (1977-1982), Museum of Modern Art, New York *''Alliance'' (1982),
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,
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*''Strata'' (1983),
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, New York *''Untitled (Comet)'' (1988), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. *''Night Sky #12'' (1995-1996),
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*''Night Sky #19'' (1998),
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,
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*''Untitled #17'' (1998), Centre Pompidou,
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*''Night Sky #20'' (1999), Kunstmuseum Winterthur,
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*''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.


Recognition

*1961 Fellowship to
Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...
Summer Session *1968 Cassandra Foundation Award *1971 & 1976 Artist’s Fellowship from
National Endowment for the Arts The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal ...
*1980
Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...
*1996 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Art *1997 Skowhegan Medal for Painting *1997 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship *2000-2001 Coutts Contemporary Art Foundation Award *2004 Elected into the
National Academy of Design The National Academy of Design is an honorary association of American artists, founded in New York City in 1825 by Samuel Morse, Asher Durand, Thomas Cole, Martin E. Thompson, Charles Cushing Wright, Ithiel Town, and others "to promote the fin ...
*2006 RISD Athena Award for Excellence in Painting *2008 Awarded the $10,000 Carnegie Prize *2009 Roswitha Haftmann Prize *2009 Fellow Award in the Visual Arts from United States Artists


References


External links


Biography, interviews, essays, artwork images and video clips
from
PBS The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcasting, public broadcaster and Non-commercial activity, non-commercial, Terrestrial television, free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virginia. PBS is a publicly fu ...
series '' Art:21 -- Art in the Twenty-First Century'' - Season 2 (2003)
Artcyclopedia pageVija Celmins at Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

Vija Celmins at the National Gallery of ArtCelmins at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
{{DEFAULTSORT:Celmins, Vija 1938 births Living people MacArthur Fellows Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Artists from Indianapolis American women painters American wood engravers Wood engravers Herron School of Art and Design alumni Artists from Riga Latvian World War II refugees Latvian emigrants to Germany National Academy of Design members American women printmakers People from Sag Harbor, New York 20th-century American women artists 20th-century American printmakers 21st-century American women artists German emigrants to the United States 20th-century engravers