Vija Celmins is an American painter and sculptor of Latvian origin. The main subjects of her photo-realistic paintings and drawings include such environmental phenomena like the ocean, cloudy sky, star fields, webs of spider and rocks.
Background
Vija Celmins was born on October 25, 1938, in Riga, Latvia. When she was a two-year-old girl, her parents and an elder sister Inta fled from the Nazi regime to Germany where they lived till the end of the War in a refugee camp in Esslingen am Neckar, Baden-Württemberg. Ten years later after Vija’s birth, the Celmins family was moved by the Church World Service to the New York City, United States. Later, Celmins settled down in Indianapolis, Indiana.
There, the artist’s father occupied the position of a carpenter, and her mother began to work in the hospital laundry. The relocation to the United States was quite difficult to Vija Celmins – she didn’t speak English and somehow felt like an outsider.
Education
Vija Celmins started to learn painting and drawing to overcome the difficulties related to her immigrant status.
So, at the age of seventeen, Vija became the student of the John Herron School of Art in Indianapolis. While in her senior year, the young girl obtained the Fellowship which allowed her to attend a Summer session at Yale University. There, Vija began to explore the art of an Italian still-life painter Giorgio Morandi as well as to create the abstract works. At the session, she met her future close friends, Chuck Close and Brice Marden. Celmins received her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1962.
The same year, Vija came to Venice, Los Angeles in order to enter the University of California where she had studied for three years and gained her Master of Arts degree.
Career
Vija Celmins started her career in 1965 as an instructor at the California State College where she had worked till 1966. The following year, she got the similar post at the University of California, Irvine and had held it for five years. Celmins also taught at the California Institute of the Arts, in Valencia.
During this period, Vija combined her teaching activity with the painting. So, in her early works, the artists depicted the common objects such as TVs, lamps, pencils and erasers in a photorealistic way. Later, she started to use photographs creating its monochrome reproductions. Despite the formal simplicity of her subjects, Celmins reflected indeed the violence of the war, such common things for the conflicts as handguns and warplanes. These early creations were exhibited at the retrospective held by the Menil Collection along with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2010. This period of career, Vija Celmins presented her creations at many solo exhibition, such as at Dickson Art Center (1965) at the University of California, Los Angeles, at Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1973), at the Felicity Samuel Gallery in London (1975) and at the Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art (1976) in Hartford, Connecticut.
The next period in Celmins’s artistic journey was marked by the shift from the artificial objects to the photorealistic drawings of the natural ones, including moon’s surface, sky, ocean, shells insides and close-ups of rocks, which she painted with graphite pencil. At the same time, the artist paid more attention to the sculpture than earlier. So, she created various series of bronze compositions and the replicas of the stones painted by acryl.
In 1981, Vija Celmins completely settled down in New York where she got the professor’s post at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She also held courses at the Cooper Union and the Yale School of Art. At the same time, the artist stopped her experiments with pencil drawings and returned to painting. However, the artist used in her work woodcuts, eraser, charcoal and printmaking. The artworks of this period were exhibited at various solo exhibitions, including Drawings and Painted Bronzes at the McKee Gallery in New York in 1983, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, the Henry Art Gallery of the University of Washington in Seattle, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the latter five in 1992.
The new theme in the artworks of Vija Celmins appeared at the beginning of the 21st century when the artist started to produce various sort of spider webs in form of negative images in oil or charcoal. In 2006, the artist had a solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Among other significant solo shows abroad of this period were these ones at the Tate Britain in London, at the National Centre for Craft & Design in Sleaford, both in 2012 and at the Latvian National Art Museum in Riga, Latvia two years later.
One of the artist’s recent projects presented at the Matthew Marks Gallery in January, February, and March 2018 and at the Senior & Shopmaker Gallery in February and March 2018, is the prints series depicting night sky and waves mezzotints.
Now Vija Celmins lives and works in New York City.
Views
Quotations:
"I believe if there is any meaning in art, it resides in the physical presence of a work."
"There aren't really rules for painting, but there are certain facts and fictions about painting. Part of what I do is document another surface and sort of translate it. They’re like translations, and then part of it is fiction, which is invention."
"Somehow the image begins to have a sort of memory in it, even if you can't see it. It can build up a dense feeling toward the end, and then it makes me happier."
"I'm not a very confessional artist, you know. I don't ever reveal what I'm feeling in my work, or what I think about the President. I use nature. I use found images."
"I guess my work sometimes confuses people, because I really have nothing to say about the ocean, or the sky, or the moon. It’s more about the feeling of the magic of making things I could never have mine: my airplane, my ocean, my sky."
"It boggles my mind, in the age of the web and everything so fast and fleeting, that someone wants to buy my work and show it, and people still want to look at it. In fact, people even seem to really like it now. Which, of course, makes me suspicious."
"I never wanted to be the girlfriend or wife of another artist.'
