Vija Celmins

Latvian American artist Vija Celmins has grappled with the impossible task of rendering the vast, unknowable expanses of the world throughout her career.Her meticulous and exquisite works on paper wrestle into being the ephemeral and fleeting qualities of the ocean, desert and night sky.

Celmins was born in 1938 in Riga, Latvia. Upon the Soviet occupation of Latvia in 1940 during World War II, Celmins and her family fled to Nazi Germany and lived in a United Nations supported Latvian refugee camp after the war. In 1948 they relocated to the United States, briefly in New York City and then in Indianapolis, Indiana. She studied at the John Herron Art Institute and later at UCLA, where she earned her MFA in 1965.

There, she kept a studio in Venice and often strolled along the boardwalk while walking her dog, sometimes accompanied by her fellow artist and friend Doug Wheeler. She began to take photographs of the Pacific Ocean as she gazed out toward the horizon from the pier. These photographs served as the springboard for the ocean drawings she would begin in 1968.

Establishing her practice in the 1960s and 1970s, Celmins created works that reacted to the culture of the time. American Pop artists and those interested in found and repurposed imagery were reinventing the way commercial processes and photography were talked about in the realm of fine art. Initially focusing on domestic objects like her contemporary Andy Warhol and investigating the place of the photograph like Gerhard Richter’s blurry facsimiles, Celmins opted for a more painstaking, less immediate but deeply rewarding practice.

While seemingly simple, Celmins’s works belie a level of expertise and care coupled with a firm conceptual backing. Impossibly detailed in their composition created using graphite charcoal and erasers, Celmins’s works give form to a deeper conversation about the production of imagery and its relation to the viewer, distance, and the nature of time.

The artistic exploration of star fields is especially telling of Celmins’s practice as it brings the artist’s hand into conversation with images not possible without cutting-edge technology. The intense labour and time that Celmins devotes to her works is ever present in the sheer exactitude of her process.

Celmins’s work has been widely exhibited, with a major career survey organised by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and exhibited in 2020 at the institution’s former space MET Brauer.