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Vija Celmins
(b. 1938)
Vija Celmins is a California painter, originally from Latvia, who experimented with photo-realism and explored graphite as an expressive medium.
Born in Riga, Latvia in 1938, Vija’s family moved to Germany in 1944 where they settled in a Latvian refugee camp near Esslinger. The Celmins family then immigrated to the United States and made their home in Indianapolis, in 1948.
Vija studied at the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis, from 1955 to 1962, making trips to New York City to see the work of the Abstract Expressionists. It was during the summer of 1961, while attending summer school at Yale University, that Celmins decided to become a painter. She moved to California, in 1963, to study at the University of California, Los Angeles where she received a Master's Degree in Fine Art. Immediately following graduation, she became a painting and drawing instructor at UCLA for one year.
Her style was transformed in California; she rejected the ideas of the New York School of artists and began to focus on the simplicity of her subject. Everyday objects that were present in her living environment became her subjects; early works were based on items such as a comb, a lamp and a hotplate. Celmins was now interested in the process, not the meaning of the object. Her artwork developed out of her desire to communicate the artistic process, presenting elements of pop art as well as photo-realism.
Her enthusiasm for photo-realism is evidenced in her paintings of the 1960’s - working from photographs she took while driving to work or walking along the beach near her home in Venice, California, where she lived between 1962 and 1980. Vija continued formal training in art attending the University of California, Irvine (1967-1972), and the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California (1976-1977). Her ocean photographs inspired a new format for Celmins, as she began to create graphite and acrylic drawings that examined the construction of the waves, in her paintings she recreated the waves through layers of paint and small marks plotted carefully to imitate light and shadow. Celmins also painted desert landscapes and began a series of paintings based on the constellations of the night sky. These were studies in natural space, devoid of color and absent of human life.
Her work has been exhibited at numerous galleries and museums, among them: Dickenson Art Center, University of California Los Angeles, 1965; David Stuart Galleries, Los Angeles 1966; David McKee Gallery, New York 1983, 1988, 1992; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia 1992-1994.
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