Vija Celmins "New Paintings, Objects, and Prints"

Mckee Gallery

poster for Vija Celmins "New Paintings, Objects, and Prints"

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A highly-acclaimed and much-admired artist nationally and internationally, Celmins is well-known for her paintings, drawings and prints of oceans, galaxies and webs. Throughout her artistic career she also has painted three-dimensional objects, such as pencils, erasers, a giant comb, puzzles, and houses of the 1960s, and in the early 1980s pairs of “identical” stones, one real, the other painted bronze, blurring the line between painting and sculpture, representation and abstraction, conceptual and physical realities. The new body of work is a continuation and a departure for Celmins. She taps into old sources with a fresh eye and extends that view over 3 media. Her work, as always, is both intimate and cosmic. In the new objects the intimate is even more directly personal, using childhood memories as its subject. Schoolroom objects, such as slate tablets, globes, maps, have a poignant, old-fashioned bent. 16 of the tablets in the exhibition are made objects, either cast in bronze and then painted or painted wood to re-invent the old slates. They are stacked or lined up with found tablets, much as the earlier stones were, to tease the viewer into looking closely. There are 4 paintings in the exhibition, 3 of which are of objects personally very special to the artist. "Shell" (2009-10) and "Darwin" (2008-10) are new images for Celmins. "Japanese Book" (2007-10), related to a project she did for The Museum of Modern Art in 2005, is of an old book she found during a trip to Japan in 2003. The more familiar "Dark Galaxy" (2000-10) is the fourth painting in the show. In addition to the objects and the paintings, Celmins has produced 9 exceptional new prints—6 galaxy mezzotints, a web, a map and a globe, with the printer, Doris Simmelink.

[Image: Vija Celmins "Shell" (2009-2010) oil on canvas 18 x 13 in.]

Media

Schedule

from April 29, 2010 to June 25, 2010

Artist(s)

Vija Celmins

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