Vija Celmins

Night Sky #15 2000–01 Oil on canvas 31 × 38 inches; 79 × 97 cm
Vija Celmins has long been admired for her meticulous renderings of natural imagery, including ocean waves, desert floors, and night skies. Her paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints depict scenes that are too vast or mercurial to be fixed in the mind’s eye. She first became interested in representing the visible world during the early 1960s, when she began to paint the objects in her Los Angeles studio — a lamp, a hot-plate, a heater, and other fixtures of everyday life — before turning her attention to photographs found in magazines and history books. By the end of the 1960s, when she first developed her all-over compositions of waves, rocks, and celestial bodies, she had set aside paint on canvas in favor of graphite on paper. When she began painting again in the 1980s, drawing and printmaking remained central to her art. Regarding her commitment to the material aspects of her process, Celmins has said, “I believe if there is any meaning in art, it resides in the physical presence of a work.”
Vija Celmins (b. 1938) was born in Riga, Latvia, and immigrated to the United States with her family in the late 1940s. She studied at the John Herron School of Art in Indiana and at Yale University before moving to Los Angeles in 1962 to pursue a master’s degree at UCLA. Celmins remained in Los Angeles until 1981, when she moved to New York, where she currently lives and works. In 1992 the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia organized the first retrospective of her work. Since then she has had one-person exhibitions at numerous museums, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Menil Collection in Houston. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1996 and received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997.
Selected Works
Lamp #1 1964
Oil on canvasFlying Fortress 1966
Oil on canvasLetter 1968
Collage and graphite on acrylic ground on paperJapanese Book 2007–10
Oil on canvasBlackboard Tableau #14 2011–15
One found object and one made object: alkyd oil, acrylic, and pastel on woodA Painting in Six Parts (detail), 1986–87/2012–16
Oil on canvasFalling Star 2016
Oil on canvasTwo Stones 1977/2014–16
One found object and one made object: alkyd oil on bronzeReverse Night Sky #3 2013–17
Oil on canvas
Exhibitions

VIJA CELMINS
Winter
February 16–April 6, 2024
522 West 22nd Street
New York

VIJA CELMINS
Ocean Prints
September 13–October 26, 2019
526 West 22nd Street
New York

VIJA CELMINS
January 27–March 31, 2018
1062 North Orange Grove
7818 Santa Monica Boulevard
Los Angeles

VIJA CELMINS
February 10–April 22, 2017
522 West 22nd Street
New York
Group Exhibitions

VIJA CELMINS / ROBERT GOBER
October 29, 2022–January 28, 2023
1062 North Orange Grove
7818 Santa Monica Boulevard
Los Angeles

ONE HUNDRED DRAWINGS
November 8, 2019–January 18, 2020
523 West 24th Street
New York

PAINTING: NOW AND FOREVER, PART III
June 28–August 17, 2018
522 West 22nd Street
526 West 22nd Street
523 West 24th Street
New York

VIJA CELMINS, THOMAS DEMAND, ELLSWORTH KELLY, KEN PRICE, PAUL SIETSEMA, REBECCA WARREN, TERRY WINTERS
February 6–April 16, 2016
522 West 22nd Street
New York

THE FOUNDATION FOR ART AND PRESERVATION IN EMBASSIES'
Lee Kimche McGrath Original Print Collection
October 6–October 13, 2012
7818 Santa Monica Boulevard
Los Angeles

SMALL SCULPTURE
September 23–October 28, 2006
523 West 24th Street
New York

OPEN SECRETS
Seventy Pictures on Paper, 1815 to the Present
November 19–December 28, 1996
523 West 24th Street
New York

AN EXHIBITION TO BENEFIT ACT-UP
The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power