Vija Celmins is a Latvian American visual artist best known for photo-realistic paintings and drawings of natural environments and phenomena such as the ocean, spider webs, star fields, and rocks.
12 Facts About Vija Celmins
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Vija Celmins was ten, and spoke no English, which caused her to focus on drawing, leading her teachers to encourage further creativity and painting.
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Vija Celmins lived in Venice until 1980, painting and sculpting, and working as an instructor at the California State University, Los Angeles, the University of California, Irvine and California Institute of the Arts, in Valencia.
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Vija Celmins returned to painting, which she had abandoned for twelve years, working during that time mainly in pencil.
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Vija Celmins recreated commonplace objects such as TVs, lamps, pencils, erasers and the painted monochrome reproductions of photographs.
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Vija Celmins has cited Malcolm Morley and Jasper Johns as influences in this period.
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Vija Celmins produced a series of bronze cast, acrylic painted stones, exact replicas of individual stones she found along the Rio Grande in Northern New Mexico, with eleven examples held at MoMA.
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Vija Celmins has said that all these works are based on photographs, and she imparts substantial effort on the built-up surfaces of the images.
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From 2008, Vija Celmins returned to objects and representative work, with paintings of maps and books, as well as many uses of small graphite tablets - hand held black boards.
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Vija Celmins produced series prints of her now well-known waves, spiderwebs, shells and desert floors, many of which were exhibited at the McKee Gallery in June 2010.
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Vija Celmins recently released a new series of prints that includes both night sky and waves mezzotints.
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Vija Celmins's works have been the subject of over forty solo exhibitions around the world since 1965, hundreds of group exhibitions.