Vija Celmins Set designer

Biography

Born in 1938 in Riga (Latvia), Vija Celmins grew up in the context of the Second World War. After the Soviet occupation and her family’s exile to Germany, she lived in a refugee camp before emigrating to the United States in 1948. Settling in Indianapolis, she discovered drawing—a refuge and a means of expression encouraged by her teachers.

In 1955, she entered the John Herron School of Art, then in 1961 received a scholarship to Yale, where she met Chuck Close and Brice Marden and studied Morandi. After graduating in 1962, she moved to Los Angeles, where she completed an MFA at UCLA (1965). During the 1960s, she established herself on the California art scene with works influenced by Pop Art and Photorealism: sculptures of domestic objects, paintings of guns and airplanes based on photographs. At the end of the decade, she abandoned color for graphite pencil, meticulously exploring the surface of the sea, the moon, rocks, and shells.

Her drawings, exhibiting near-photographic precision, evoke those of Gerhard Richter. Between 1976 and 1983, she returned to sculpture: bronze or acrylic stones reproduced identically. From the 1980s onward, she resumed painting and wood engraving, working with texture, greys, and emptiness. The ocean, the sky, and constellations became her recurring themes.

Since the 2000s, she has produced series of canvases and prints representing spiderwebs, waves, deserts, or maps, often inspired by photographs. Based in New York (SoHo and Sag Harbor), Vija Celmins has been the subject of more than forty solo exhibitions and retrospectives at the MoMA, the Whitney Museum, LACMA, SFMOMA, and the Centre Pompidou. A recipient of Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she is now recognized as a major figure in contemporary art, combining rigor, silence, and contemplation.

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