Vija Celmins Images Fixed in Memory
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is the first location of an extensive survey exhibition of Vija Celmins (b. 1938, Riga), touring to Toronto and New York later in 2019. The first North American retrospective of the artist’s work in 25 years, “Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory” brings together nearly 150 works including paintings, sculptures and drawings.
“I have long been interested in building a form in the painting. It’s hard to define the word form, but I wanted to make a work that was multidimensional, that went back and forth in space yet remained what it was: a small, concentrated area that was essentially flat,” American-Latvian artist Vija Celmins explained to her friend and colleague Chuck Close in a recent interview. More than pure representation, Celmins’ works could be described as re-creations of the world that we experience every day outside the canvas: refined, perfected duplicates of portions of reality, living in the two-dimensional space of the painted surface. Featuring her meticulous “re-descriptions” of the physical world, “Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory” – the first North American retrospective of the artist’s work in 25 years – opens this December at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, before traveling to Canada (Art Gallery of Ontario, May 4 – August 4, 2019) and New York City (The Met Breuer, from September 24, 2019). “This exhibition is an exciting culmination of more than ten years working closely with the artist,” points out Gary Garrels, co-curator of the survey with Ian Alteveer. Nearly 150 works spanning the breadth of Celmins’ career from the 1960s to the present, including paintings, drawings in graphite and charcoal as well as sculptures, populate this ambitious show. They include a selection of five paintings depicting World War II fighter planes – a haunting memory for Celmins who, back in the 1940s, fled from Latvia with her family before the Soviet occupation. Relocated to California, she spent her time producing iconic drawings of oceans, photo-realistic black and white images in which the boundary between figuration and abstraction gets blurry. During this time, drawing – a medium intensely tested
and explored by the artist – became the most suitable tool for Celmins’ cerebral imagination: “I see drawing as thinking, as evidence of thinking, evidence of going from one place to another,” she once remarked. “One draws to define one thing from another. One draws proportions, adjusts scale. It is impossible to paint without drawing.”
Images of the night sky, another recurring subject in the artist’s oeuvre, occupy two spaces at SFMOMA – one for paintings and one for drawings, all produced from the late 1980s to 2001. And there is sculpture, of course: among the highlights on view in San Francisco, her gigantic Comb (1969-70), the composition of tablets Blackboard Tableau #1 (2007-10) and
To Fix the Image in Memory I–XI (1977-82). The latter, in particular, epitomizes Celmins’ artistic sensibility. Comprised of 11 pairs of found stones and their bronze casts whose surfaces have been accurately painted, this work was created by Celmins over the course of five years. Across this long span, the artist has not simply re-produced or re-described the original stones: she has “re-created” them, turning our most familiar reality into an arcane, mystical new world.
“Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory.”
SFMOMA, San Francisco. December 15, 2018 – March 31, 2019.