ART CITIES: Los Angeles-Vija Celmins/Robert Gober
The exhibition “Vija Celmins / Robert Goberbr / Robert Gober” brings together a selection of paintings, sculpture, and works on paper by these two celebrated artists. 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. Since the early 1980s, Robert Gober has produced paradoxical sculptures that seem to embody qualities of both hand-made and machine-made objects at the same time. His works are often replicas of items found in everyday life but his deliberate fabrication techniques transform these mundane things into pieces of fine art.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Matthew Marks Gallery Archive
Vija Celmins has long been admired for her meticulous renderings of natural imagery, including ocean waves, desert floors, and night skies. Her paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints depict scenes that are too vast or mercurial to be fixed in the mind’s eye. She first became interested in representing the visible world during the early 1960s, when she began to paint the objects in her Los Angeles studio — a lamp, a hot-plate, a heater, and other fixtures of everyday life — before turning her attention to photographs found in magazines and history books. By the end of the 1960s, when she first developed her all-over compositions of waves, rocks, and celestial bodies, she had set aside paint on canvas in favor of graphite on paper. When she began painting again in the 1980s, drawing and printmaking remained central to her art. Regarding her commitment to the material aspects of her process, Celmins has said, “I believe if there is any meaning in art, it resides in the physical presence of a work”. Vija Celmins’s painting “Porsche” (1966–67) is based on a photograph she took while driving on the freeway in Los Angeles. It will be shown along with two of her more recent paintings of the night sky, as well as one of her blackboard tablets, in which she meticulously recreates an everyday object by hand. Since the 1970s Robert Gober has been exploring sexuality, religion, and politics in meticulously handcrafted work. Early in his career The New York Times described his sculptures as “minimal forms with maximum content.” In his art even the most commonplace object — a shoe, a sink, a bag of cat litter — contains multiple meanings and implications. The foundation of his practice is the physical act of making. What might appear at first to be a dented can of ordinary house paint, for example, might turn out to be a hand-painted sculpture in solid lead crystal. While Gober’s work addresses universal themes of loss and longing, his personal experiences deeply inform his art, charging each work with an acute sense of intimacy. Robert Gober’s “Untitled (functioning sink) “(1992) is a cast bronze sculpture of a sink with water continually running from its taps. Also included is a new sculpture by Gober completed earlier this year and exhibited for the first time.
Photo: Robert Gober, Untitled 1989–96, Silk satin, muslin, linen, tulle, welded steel, hand-printed silkscreen on paper, cast hydrostone plaster, vinyl acrylic paint, ink, graphite, Dimensions variable, © Robert Gober, Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery
Info: Matthew Marks Gallery, 1062 North Orange Grove, Los Angeles, CA, USA, & Matthew Marks Gallery, 7818 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 29/10-23/12/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://matthewmarks.com/
