Vija Celmins

Biography

At ten, Vija Celmins arrived in Indianapolis and spoke no English. Drawing turned out to be easier than explaining herself, and her teachers began to encourage her in it.

She was born on 25 October 1938 in Riga. During the war her parents left with her and her older sister Inta for Germany; after the war the family lived in a Latvian refugee camp in Esslingen am Neckar. In 1948 the Church World Service relocated them to the United States, first briefly to New York and then to Indianapolis. A Lutheran church helped her father find work as a carpenter and her mother a job in a hospital laundry.

In 1955 she entered the John Herron School of Art in Indianapolis. She later said that it was there that she first stopped feeling like an outsider. In the summer of 1961 she attended Yale on a fellowship, where she met Chuck Close and Brice Marden; the friendships lasted. Around then she became interested in Giorgio Morandi and painted abstract works. After graduating from Herron in 1962 she moved to Venice, a district of Los Angeles, to study for a master’s degree at the University of California, Los Angeles, which she completed in 1965. By her own account, far from her parents, she found there a great deal of freedom to experiment.

Her early work of the 1960s is representational: televisions, lamps, pencils, erasers, monochrome painted copies of photographs. Violence and conflict often sound through them: warplanes, a handgun in an outstretched hand, riot scenes. Among those who influenced her in this period she named Malcolm Morley and Jasper Johns. In 2010 the Menil Collection, together with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, organised a retrospective of her work from 1964 to 1966. From the late 1960s she abandoned painting and for many years concentrated on graphite pencil. She made highly detailed drawings from photographs: the surface of the ocean and of the Moon, the insides of shells, close-ups of rocks. Critics compared her patient manner with that of Chuck Close and Gerhard Richter. From 1976 to 1983 she also returned to sculpture: she cast stones in bronze and painted them with acrylic, exact copies of stones she had found along the Rio Grande in northern New Mexico. Eleven of them are held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. For a time she taught at the University of California, Irvine, the California Institute of the Arts and other colleges; in 1978 she was an artist-in-residence at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art under the CETA programme, a federal employment and training scheme.

In 1981, after an invitation to teach at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, she moved permanently to New York, to be closer to the artists and the art she liked. She returned to painting after a break of twelve years, during which she had worked mainly in pencil. Woodcut, charcoal and a great many erasers followed: she erases darkness, leaving grey tones with subtle gradations. From the 1980s her subjects have been constellations, the Moon and the ocean; by 2000 spider webs appeared, also as negative images, in oil or charcoal. Cutting the woodblock for a single print of water can take a year.

Critics note that her images have no horizon, no depth of field, no edge of the frame, no landmarks: we do not know where the ocean was photographed, which constellation it is, what web. I think that is where the strength lies: the picture is cut off from any clue, and what remains is only a surface worked on for months. She herself said that she gave up Abstract Expressionism because she could not reconcile her brushstroke with the stillness of the painting.

After 2008 she returned to objects: she painted maps and books, made small graphite “tablets”, and produced series of prints with waves, spider webs, shells and desert floors. Her work has been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the Centre Pompidou, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2020) and the Kunsthalle Hamburg, where in 2023 a show set her in dialogue with Gerhard Richter. In 2005 the collector Edward R. Broida gave the Museum of Modern Art 17 of her works.

Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship (1980), a MacArthur Fellowship (1997), the Roswitha Haftmann Prize (2009) and the Praemium Imperiale (2023). In 2019 she received the Latvian Order of the Three Stars, Commander class.