The Met Breuer
Vija Celmins – To Fix
The Image in Memory
Retrospective Exhibition
At The
Met Breuer the retrospective exhibition - Vija Celmins – To Fix The Image in Memory - until January 12,
provides a comprehensive view of her work through a selection of approximately
120 works—from her earliest paintings made in Los Angeles in the 1960s to objects completed in New York in the last five years.
Celmins bases her exquisitely wrought paintings, sculpture, drawings, and
prints on the world around us—sometimes through direct observation, but more
often mediated by photography.
Pink
Pearl Eraser
– 1966-67
Balsa wood and acrylic
paint
“Nostalgic
images… reaching back and taking care of these memories…and sort of connecting
with myself.”
This work marks a key moment in Celmins’s transition from depicting
objects in her studio to working with wartime imagery. Through such - nostalgic
images - as Celmins has called them, she revisited her childhood in war-torn Europe.
Vija
Celmins – T.V.
– 1964
oil on canvas
Celmins based her wood models
on real buildings – one in Venice, California
and another, a saltbox farmhouse in Indiana
where she lived as a child. She painted them with favorite motifs such as
airplanes, trains, smoke and clouds. While
Celmins acknowledges an interest in Oppenheimer
and Magritte in these pieces she
was also inspired by Tony Berlant, a
friend and fellow UCLA student who
was making assemblage sculptures of houses in the mid-1960s.
House # 2 – 1965
wood – canvas – oil paint
– fox fur – metal
Explosion
at Sea
– 1966
oil on canvas
“It occurred
to me that the image and surface were interlocking with the picture plane so
the work could invite one in and keep one out at the same time.”
Celmins’s second Los Angeles studio was not far from Venice Beach and in 1968 she began
taking photographs of the Pacific Ocean,
a subject that would command her attention for the next decade.
Ocean – 1990
oil on canvas
“The
black images of the night sky invite you in, you come close, and then you’re
kept out by their physical flatness…which begins to have this strange, quality. You
think you may be seeing something that isn’t there…the feeling of a deeper
space, but also solid structure before you.
Both things at the same time.”
Night Sky
#15 –
2000-2001
oil on linen mounted on
wood
“I tend
to do images over and over again, because each one has a different tone, slant,
a different relationship to the plane, and so a different special experience.”
Celmins stopped painting and
switched to graphite as a new and more precise medium and she usually prefers
to have her drawings shown without mats to underscore the notion that they are
physical objects rather than windows framing an illusion.
Clouds – 1968
graphite on paper
“Already
made by schoolkids and me… a way of engaging somebody in what you have
done. Because when you look close, of
course, you see one of the tablets has been painted.”
This group of blackboards includes three found
objects and seven produced in wood by sculptor Edward Finnegan that were based on vintage tablets. She painted each side of the facsimiles, inscribing
traces of wear, cracks, and splinters.
Her inclusion of a meticulously stained tag further extends the work’s
optical illusionism. She was delighted
by the consistency between handmade replicas and the originals.
Blackboard
Tableau #1
– 2007-10
Found tablets – wood – acrylic
paint – alkyd – pastel – string – paper – graphite
Blackboard
Tableau # 14
– 2011-15
Found tablets – wood – acrylic
paint – alkyd – pastel
“For a
while the subject was the photograph… So whatever the photograph told me, I
did. I found a great freedom in this.”
In the late 1960s Celmins began collecting pictures of the moon from newspapers,
magazines and astronomy books. Her large
personal archive became a basis for a number of drawings and became more of a
starting point which she sometimes complicated her sources by placing pictures
on top of one another or by doubling or enlarging details. Her shifts emphasize
the constructed nature of the images and their distance from directly observed
reality.
Untitled
(Moon
Surface
Luna 9 - #1)
– 1969
graphite on acrylic
ground on paper
Vija Celmins – To Fix
The Image in Memory
Retrospective
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