Between Intimacy and Immensity: The Inscrutable Vija Celmins

Over her 60-year career, Vija Celmins has only made a total of 220 paintings, drawings and prints, and for good reason. Much of her work seems impossible because her choices of images—oceans, deserts, galaxies—are vast and impenetrable. She does not paint people. Her preference, she says, is “No composition. No gestures. No artificial color. No distortion. No ego.” And yet, she is present in all of these images, meticulous and animated. There is no mistaking her work.

She also creates sculptures depicting objects like rocks, slate blackboards, a large pencil that sprawls out on the floor and a rope ladder that coils to the ceiling. Each object is realistic, not recognizable as made-sculpture. Similarly, her many paintings don’t read like paintings, but they clearly aren’t photographs either, as one sees in the close-up oil-on-canvas of an antique blue book she found in Japan and painted using fourteen different colors. Her images from the Hubble Space Telescope have no two stars painted the same. She makes paintings of eroded seashells, snow falling, a burning plane, the close-up surface of a vase and the surface of the moon.

There are no boundaries to her night sky, desert and ocean paintings that convey the vastness of these places too big to capture. The paintings are tactile, immense yet fragile, with only the edge of the canvas as a stopping point, chopping off the space in mid-air. Sometimes the image is unrecognizable. Without her titles, we would be hard-pressed to see the surface of a plate or the desert floor. Vase, from 2017-18, could be the worn leather of an old satchel, the hide of an elephant, or a leather-bound 19th-century book. Without the titles, we are dropped into the canvas, close-in, examining, seeking recognition. That microscopic view is the mystery and power. Celmins also has the extraordinary technical ability to take a 3D object and flatten it onto a 2D surface. Once you know what it is, there is shock. That is the surface of a shell!

About her Knife and Dish, 1964, she wrote, “No composition… No gestures (deadpan painting) No artificial color No distortion No collage No signs or effort showing No ego NO BIG PAINTING—found this hard to do.” There it is again—No ego. This is hard to do, forgetting the self that is painting the knife and dish, without any personal association to eating with a knife from a dish. The power of Celmins’ works is not that they look so realistic, which they most certainly do, but that the still life is alive with its own self-contained personality. Knife and Dish measures only 16 x 18 inches. Unassuming and beautiful, it is a long consideration.

Her work defies the imagination. How is this possible? The graphite Big Sea, 1969, is an endless ocean, churning, the water wrinkled with waves, seemingly suspended in time. When she painted this, was she in a trance? Celmins said about the painting: “This work is a record of examined + intense looking, something internal from me to it, and something said back to me. A relationship, an opening of some innocence and a disappearance of time in its making. In the work I like best, these qualities remain.” These works are on a grand scale, rendered in a contained area while still feeling vast, without boundary. And she didn’t just do one ocean painting; she did five. How could these have been painted by hand? Is this the ocean or sand dunes from above after a sandstorm? Celmins said she was documenting the surface of the ocean.

Pencil, oil on canvas with graphite, 1966, feels alive yet perfectly symmetrical and inert. Shadows lift the octagonal end and pointed tip as if it were at the moment of lift-off, rocketing out of the frame. Night Sky #16 used 20 layers of paint. Each layer was sanded off in between, from black mixed with burnt umber, ultramarine blue, or bits of white. Her early Night Skies were graphite changing to charcoal. Circles of different sizes are the stars, filled with liquid rubber and sanded. About Star Field III, 1982-83, she said, “Star fields dense with lead from pencils. Just that. Paper and pencil. A relationship. A dance, remain just paper + lead.” The more you stare at the painting, the more it moves, receding and advancing.

There are her desert floors with shards of bleached rock strewn helter-skelter. The parched landscape under dry, blanching sun gives off, yet again, a boundaryless space. But unlike the ocean paintings, these are lifeless and still. She said the desert “lies somewhere between distance and intimacy… a different kind of space…” Also her snow paintings—white-outs, obscure, also impossible, a chaos of white darkness just as expansive as her deserts and star-blasted night skies. Celmins is a master of timeless space.

Born in Riga, Latvia, in 1938, Celmins became a refugee in 1944. Four years later, she and her family emigrated to the United States, to Indianapolis, where she went to high school and later attended the John Herron Art Institute. She went on to study art at UCLA on scholarship. Today, she lives and works in New York City and Sag Harbor, Long Island.

A large solo exhibition, “Vija Celmins,” is currently on view at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, curated by Theodora Vischer, chief curator of the museum, and writer and curator James Lingwood. Ninety paintings, drawings, sculptures and prints showcase the six decades of her work from the 1960s to the present. The 208-page illustrated catalogue accompanying the exhibit is superb. It is poetic and strikingly elegant. There are essays, poems and thoughts by writers and artists: Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk, Julian Bell, Marlene Dumas and others. It is a rare catalogue and refreshing that it can be read for its literary writing. The catalogue was edited by Theodora Vischer and James Lingwood for the Fondation Beyeler and designed by Teo Schifferli, published by Hatje Cantz Verlag, Berlin.

Celmins’s work is a meditation on the natural world. The long looking and deep consideration are in all the paintings. Web, from 1992, is like the grids that describe spacetime in physics books. It could also be fractals, an infinite, never-ending spiral, an event horizon on the edge of a black hole—the perilous journey towards the black center of nothingness. The painting is an inversion of energy. She describes her spider web paintings as “a drawing about small shifts of mass.”

In the catalogue, artist Glenn Ligon said this about the mezzotint, Galaxy, 1985. “The image is made up of tiny dots, applied by hand to a copper or zinc plate with a rocker (a metal tool with small teeth)… This produces, once the plate is inked, a solid black. Scraping away at this blackness with a burnisher uncovers bare metal. Those are the stars.” One can only imagine the tender and intense concentration that the print demanded. Celmins said, “The mezzotint took a long, long time.”

Celmins has also said that her work isn’t political or expressive of anything outside itself. She inspects the subject through “intuition… + rigor… The work remains ‘in the dark’ so to speak, for a long time, until my efforts peter out or become too repetitive, or I can no longer sustain them, or the work no longer seems to need me.”

“Vija Celmins” runs through September 21, 2025, at Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland.

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