BASEL.- This summer, the Fondation Beyeler presents one of the most comprehensive solo exhibitions ever devoted to the American artist Vija Celmins (*1938, Riga) in Europe. Best known for her deeply absorbing paintings and drawings of galaxies, moon surfaces, deserts and oceans, Celmins’ work invites the viewer to pause, look closely and immerse oneself in their captivating surfaces. Like a spider’s web, they draw the observer in, encouraging them to contemplate the tensions between surface and space, closeness and distance, stillness and movement. Organised in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition brings together around 90 works, mostly paintings and drawings, as well as a small number of sculptures and graphic works.


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Born in Riga, Latvia in 1938, Celmins became a refugee in 1944 before emigrating with her family to the United States in 1948. She grew up in Indianapolis and later as an art student moved to Los Angeles, then to New Mexico, New York and Long Island, where she lives and works today. Held in the highest regard, her work is sought after by renowned museums and private collections alike. However, opportunities to see Celmins’ work in any depth are extremely rare, not least because the artist has made only around 220 paintings, drawings and sculptures over the course of her entire career. Vija Celmins has always worked at her own pace, refusing to bend to the prevailing currents of the art world and remaining resolute in her close attention to her practice.

The exhibition offers a comprehensive overview of a remarkable 60-year career, presenting carefully selected groups of paintings, drawings, graphic works and sculptures. Beginning with a selection of important early paintings of everyday objects from the 1960s, the exhibition culminates in a room of recent masterful paintings of snow falling through a night sky, conjuring up the mystery of the cosmos.

The exhibition opens with a focus on Celmins’ paintings from 1964 to 1968, when she was living in a studio on Venice Beach in Los Angeles. Unlike many artists working in the city in the 1960s, Celmins was not drawn to the vivid light and colour of California. Hers was largely an interior world. In 1964, she made a group of paintings of single domestic objects and appliances, including a plate, heater, hotplate, and lamp. Inspired by her encounter with paintings by Giorgio Morandi and Diego Velázquez on a trip to Italy and Spain in 1962, and distancing herself from the bright colours of Pop Art, she used a muted palette of browns and greys, with the occasional jolt of electric red.

Over the next two years, from 1965 to 1967, Celmins made several paintings based on images from World War II and other conflicts that she found in books and magazines; bomber planes suspended in a grey sky or crashed on the ground, a man in flames running from a burning car, race riots in Los Angeles from the cover of Time magazine. Silenced and still, these ominous paintings convey both the memory of war and a more recent reality in which the ubiquity of images has a distancing effect.

From 1968 to 1992, Celmins devoted herself almost exclusively to making drawings. She continued to work from photographs, both found in magazines and taken by herself. Her subjects were clouds, as well as the surface of the moon, the desert and the ocean. She began with a group of drawings of lunar landscapes based on photographs taken by the US moon probes in the late 1960s, which brought close-ups of a previously unreachable place into the living rooms of many people around the world. These were followed in 1973 by Celmins’ first drawings of galaxies based on images from NASA telescopes. Such photographs provided Celmins with the impetus, which she has since followed, to create images that turn the tension between the depth of spaces and the surface of the image into a visual experience.

While living in Los Angeles, Celmins went on excursions into the deserts of California, Nevada and New Mexico, where she also lived for several months. Fascinated by the boundless landscapes, she began to depict the silence and the sense of time standing still in drawings. Towards the end of the 1970s, Celmins created a sculpture in which her confrontation with reality took on a new form. To Fix the Image in Memory I-XI, 1977–1982, consists of eleven different pebbles she had collected in the New Mexico desert, presented alongside their doubles; eleven copies cast in bronze and painted in such a way that the original and the replica are barely distinguishable to the naked eye.

Celmins’ images are based on photographs or, in the case of the rare sculptures, on objects as models. The template is a kind of tool for Celmins, allowing her not to have to concern herself with composition and framing. However, she does not make a copy of the original; it is not a matter of photorealism. Rather, one could say that Celmins recreates or rebuilds the original. Her pictures are constructed in countless layers of graphite or charcoal on paper and oil paint on canvas. It is as if Celmins is trying to grasp and capture the incomprehensible vastness by hand. This can be seen particularly in her numerous paintings of the starry night sky, a motif that has fascinated Celmins since her early days.

In 1992, Celmins came across illustrations of spider webs in a book. Drawn to their fragile threads and concentric patterns, she made a group of paintings and charcoal drawings. This exploration continued with a number of paintings of objects with textured surfaces; the cover of a Japanese book, the cracked enamel of a Korean vase, the scuffed surfaces of slate boards picked up in flea markets on Long Island, the pitted form of an eroded seashell – each painting an exquisite meditation on the passage of time.

In the final room of the exhibition, this meditation continues through Celmins’ most recent paintings, which are among the largest works she has ever made. Based on photos of snowflakes illuminated in the sky at night, they convey a profound sense of silence and awe.

Alongside the exhibition, the Fondation Beyeler presents “Vija”, a short film by renowned filmmakers Bêka & Lemoine. Over 30 minutes, the film paints a special, spontaneous portrait of the artist, who reflects upon her lifelong practice while opening both the doors to her studio and the drawers of her archive. The portrait takes viewers on a journey among the forms, images and thoughts at the heart of Vija Celmins’ unique sensibility.

“Vija Celmins” is curated by Theodora Vischer, Chief Curator of the Fondation Beyeler, and writer and curator James Lingwood.

A richly illustrated exhibition catalogue, edited by Theodora Vischer and James Lingwood for the Fondation Beyeler and designed by Teo Schifferli, is published by Hatje Cantz Verlag, Berlin. Comprising 208 pages, it contains ‘Notes’ by Vija Celmins as well as short contributions by Julian Bell, Jimena Canales, Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk, Marlene Dumas, Katie Farris, Robert Gober, Ilya Kaminsky, Glenn Ligon, Andrew Winer, with an introduction by James Lingwood.



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