Vija Celmins was born
in Riga, Latvia in 1938. Celmins immigrated to the United States
with her family when she was ten years old, settling in Indiana.
She received a BFA from the John Herron Institute in Indianapolis,
and later earned her MFA in painting from the University of California,
Los Angeles. Celmins received international attention early on for
her renditions of natural scenes—often copied from photographs
that lack a point of reference, horizon, or discernable depth of
field. Armed with a nuanced
palette
of blacks and grays, Celmins
renders
these limitless space—seascapes, night skies, and the barren
desert floor—with an uncanny accuracy, working for months on
a single image. Celmins has a highly attuned sense for organic detail
and the elegance of imperfection. Her most recent series of works
take as their subject delicate spider webs. In works like “Web
#2,” Celmins renders the translucent quality of the web, lending
the image a sense of discovery and wonder. A master of several mediums,
including oil painting, charcoal, and multiple printmaking processes,
Celmins matches a tangible sense of space with sensuous detail in
each work. Vija Celmins received an American Academy of Arts and
Letters Award in 1996 and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship
in 1997. Retrospectives of her work have traveled to the Whitney
Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Contemporary
Art, Los Angeles, the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, and
the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In 2002, a retrospective of Celmins’
prints was held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Celmins currently
resides in New York and California.
For additional biographic & bibliographic information:
McKee Gallery, New York
Vija Celmins on the Art21 blog |
