Tue 24 Sep 2019 to Sun 12 Jan 2020
945 Madison Avenue, NY 10021 Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory
temporary closure
Artist: Vija Celmins
This retrospective provides a comprehensive view of Vija Celmins's career through a selection of approximately 120 works—from her earliest paintings made in Los Angeles in the 1960s to objects completed in New York in the last five years.
Throughout an accomplished career that spans more than fifty years, Celmins (American, b. 1938, Riga, Latvia) has sustained a practice of deep focus and extraordinary skill in a wide range of media. Celmins bases her exquisitely wrought paintings, sculpture, drawings, and prints on the world around us—sometimes through direct observation, but more often mediated by photography. Whether her sources are quotidian objects from her first studio in Venice, California, photographs of the Pacific Ocean taken at the local pier, or reproductions from newspapers, magazines, scientific exploration and inquiry, the resulting work possesses a magical verisimilitude.
The exhibition is made possible in part by the Aaron I. Fleischman and Lin Lougheed Fund.
It is co-organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.