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Vija Celmins (b. 1938)

Vija Celmins was born in 1938 in Riga, Latvia, and moved with her family to the United States in 1948. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Herron School of Art in 1962 and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1965. Her first solo exhibition took place in Los Angeles in 1966. Celmins has taught at the University of California, Irvine; California Institute of the Arts, Valencia; Cooper Union; and Yale University. From 1992 to 1994, a midcareer retrospective of her work, organized at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, traveled to the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She was the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980, the Award in Art at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship in 1997, and the Coutts Contemporary Art Foundation Award in 2000.

She also has had one-artist exhibitions at the Newport Harbor Museum, Newport Beach, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, and the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main. Celmins currently lives and works in New York City.

Other exhibiting venues include the Armand Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; Herron School of Art, Indianapolis; Susan Sheehan Gallery, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel; McKee Gallery, New York; Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London; Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Kunstmuseum, Winterthur; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; McKee Gallery, New York, Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain Paris; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Aspen Art Museum, Aspen; The Art Museum at Florida International University, Miami; American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York; Daniel Weinberg Gallery, San Francisco; Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach; Thomas Solomon's Garage, Los Angeles; Lannan Foundation, Los Angeles; Anthony Slayter-Ralph, Santa Barbara; Cirrus, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Fine Arts Center, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Pence Gallery, Santa Monica; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Dickinson Art Center, UCLA, Los Angeles.

Internationally known for her intensely realistic paintings and drawings, Celmins has worked in the print medium since the early 1960s, meticulously rendering details of the natural environment through a careful exploration of process and mark. Celmins's oeuvre reveals an engagement with the natural world manifest in the history of art from Giotto's night sky on the ceiling of the Arena Chapel to Claude Mellan's intimate engravings of the moon's craggy surface to Martin Johnson Heade's Luminist seas. Her approach to these enduring subjects, however, is the result of a modern sensibility. Derived from photographs rather than direct observation—"the photographs are the subject matter," Celmins has said—her images dispel romantic notions of nature's sublime.

The subject matter, in fact, is secondary to Celmins, whose primary interest is an ongoing investigation of the formal aspects of art making, particularly the representation of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface.

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