BOOK: Vija Celmins-2017, Matthew Marks Publications

Vija Celmins has been rendering nature imagery from black and white photographic sources since the 1960s, exploring the same subjects repeatedly in paintings, drawings, and prints. The catalogue “2017” is published on the occasion of Vija Celmins’s first exhibition of new work in seven years, featuring paintings, works on paper, and sculptures of the subjects. Along with her renderings of the ocean’s surface and the night sky, it includes sculptures in which a found object, such as a chalkboard or a small stone, is paired with a meticulously painted bronze depiction of itself. The exhibition’s largest work, an oil painting nearly 152 cm wide, depicts an array of stars floating on a dark field. As in the other night sky paintings, its seemingly monochromatic palette includes vivid colors applied in numerous layers to create a sense of depth. Other works in the exhibition showed a night sky inverted, with black stars on a light-gray or white field. Designed in collaboration with the artist, the book features over seventy images, including dozens of detail photographs to capture the artworks’ nuanced colors and intricate surfaces. As Bob Nickas explains in the essay, ”The paintings, though seen from both near and far, only ever reveal themselves in proximity. Before them, we get as close to the surface as she was in their making. We see them in relation to the artist, her body and mind, and thus to her intention: to examine something as directly as possible”. -Dimitris Lempesis