Skip to main content

Nature Redescribed: The Work of Vija Celmins

Although she’s been friendly with artists from both coasts of the United States throughout her five-decade career, Vija Celmins has remained agnostic regarding trends and movements; like nature itself, her discipline operates on its own terms. “When I’m working,” she says in a 1992 interview with Chuck Close, “my instinct is to try to build and to fill. To fill something until it is really full.” She has referred to her meticulous, overflowing portraits of the natural world as “redescriptions,” a word that implies paraphrasing rather than pure invention. But this perhaps minimizes her genius—nearly as expansive and awe inspiring as the night skies and desert floors they depict, Celmins’s works demand to be experienced firsthand. In that setting, they close the distance, enveloping the viewer in gloriously rendered detail. The first major North American exhibition of her work in more than twenty-five years is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through March 31, after which the show will travel to the Art Gallery of Ontario (May 4–August 4) and the Met Breuer (September 23, 2019–January 12, 2020). Below, we present a selection of images from the book Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory, which accompanies the show.

 

Vija Celmins, Untitled (Big Sea #2), 1969, graphite and acrylic ground on paper. Private collection. © Vija Celmins. Photo courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery.

 

Vija Celmins, Clouds, 1968, graphite on paper. Private collection. © Vija Celmins. Photo courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery.

 

Vija Celmins, Web #1, 1998, charcoal on paper. Tate Modern, London, acquired jointly with the National Galleries of Scotland through the d’Offay Donation with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund 2008. © Vija Celmins. Photo courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery.

 

Vija Celmins, Desert Surface #1, 1991, oil on wood. Private collection. © Vija Celmins. Photo courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery.

 

Vija Celmins, To Fix the Image in Memory I–XI, 1977–82, eleven stones and eleven made objects (bronze and acrylic paint). The Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of Edward R. Broida in honor of David and Renee McKee. © Vija Celmins. Photo courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery.

 

Vija Celmins, Shell, 2009–10, oil on canvas. Private collection. © Vija Celmins. Photo courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery.

 

Vija Celmins, Letter, 1968, collage and graphite on acrylic ground on paper. Collection of the artist. © Vija Celmins. Photo courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery.

 

Vija Celmins, Night Sky #16, 2000–2002, oil on linen mounted on wood. Gift of Helen and Charles Schwab through the Art Supporting Foundation. © Vija Celmins. Photo courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery.

 

Images from Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory, edited by Gary Garrels, published by Yale University Press in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. © 2018 Yale University Press.



from The Paris Review http://bit.ly/2S2DyJx

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...
Post a Comment
Read more

DEMOCRACY DAY SPEECH BY PMB; MAY 29 2016

www.naijaloaded.com My compatriots, It is one year today since our administration came into office. It has been a year of triumph, consolidation, pains and achievements. By age, instinct and experience, my preference is to look forward, to prepare for the challenges that lie ahead and rededicate the administration to the task of fixing Nigeria. But I believe we can also learn from the obstacles we have overcome and the progress we made thus far, to help strengthen the plans that we have in place to put Nigeria back on the path of progress. We affirm our belief in democracy as the form of government that best assures the active participation and actual benefit of the people. Despite the many years of hardship and disappointment the people of this nation have proved inherently good, industrious tolerant, patient and generous. The past years have witnessed huge flows of oil revenues. From 2010 average oil prices were $100 per barrel. But economic and security co...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .   In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...
Post a Comment
Read more