LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Los Angeles County Museum of Art presents Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster 1964-1966, exploring an essential yet often overlooked period of the artist’s work. Throughout much of her career, Vija Celmins has been internationally recognized for her meticulously executed paintings and drawings using a monochrome palette of black and gray, depicting starry night skies, ocean waves, barren desert floors, and fragile spider webs. But the images that first grounded her interest as a young artist in Los Angeles during the early 1960s are characterized by violent themes such as crashing warplanes, smoking handguns, and other images of death and disaster influenced by the violence of the era—the war in Vietnam, social change, political assassinations—and the mass media that represented it: newspapers, magazines, and television.
Organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The Menil Collection, Houston, Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster 1964-1966 is the first exhibition to concentrate on an important segment of Celmins’s art dictated by a specific time and subject matter. Recent survey exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, have concentrated on her drawings and prints, respectively. Bringing together paintings and sculptures from national and international museums and private collections, all from a brief three-year period, this exhibition uncovers the technical and thematic groundwork from which Celmins would build her international career.
The exhibition curators are Franklin Sirmans, the Terri and Michael Smooke Department Head and Curator of Contemporary Art at LACMA, and Menil Collection Associate Curator Michelle White. “It was between 1964 and 1966, before she was 30 years old, that Celmins created some of her most important pieces in her Venice Beach studio,” said Sirmans. “She was aware of what was happening politically and socially in the world via television, newspapers, and magazines, and thus her work evolved—entwined with time and memory of family and growing up.”
When Celmins arrived in Los Angeles in 1962, the city’s art scene was realizing its final break with Abstract Expressionism, forging a coolly detached Pop Art aesthetic unique to Southern California. With Walter Hopps’s Ferus Gallery at its epicenter, artists such as Larry Bell, Joe Goode, and Ed Ruscha offered stylistic alternatives to both Abstract Expressionism’s action painting and New York’s bold version of Pop Art. The city’s artists sought inspiration in found art and the painting of common everyday objects, creating a fluid new language to critique the decade’s increasingly commercialized and media-driven culture. Though often associated with the Pop artists of the 1960s, Celmins’s work is equally indebted to Conceptualism.
Never fully linked to the California Pop movement, Celmins is often overlooked as an important figure in post-Abstract Expressionist art. Television and Disaster brings to light the artist’s ability to appropriate the media of her era—from newspapers and magazines to snapshots and television—to speak to her own background, while offering a distinctive contribution to this cool and aloof aesthetic. Vija Celmins was born in 1938 in Riga, Latvia, and fled with her family to Germany in advance of the Soviet army’s invasion in 1944. Migrating to the United States in 1948 after World War II, the family settled in Indianapolis, where Celmins took art classes and graduated from the John Herron Art Institute with a BFA. In 1961 she received a scholarship to attend the Yale Summer School of Art and Music, where she met artists Brice Marden and Chuck Close. A year later, Celmins relocated to the West Coast to attend graduate school in painting at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has lived and worked primarily in New York since 1981.
