Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Opens Vija Celmins Television and Disaster 1964-1966
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art presents Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster 1964-1966, on view March 13, 2011–June 5, 2011.
Painter Vija Celmins, born in 1938 in Riga, Latvia, has lived and worked primarily in New York since 1981. She immigrated to the United States with her family at the age of ten to Indiana where she attended the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis before completing an MFA degree at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1965. With a palette focused on the gradations between black and gray, Celmins has been known since then as a painter of refined representational images—including night skies, ocean waves and spider webs. But the images that first grounded her interest were of war planes, smoking guns, and other images of death and disaster. In both instances, the precisely rendered paintings suggest the importance of slowness in viewing art and an attention to detail that is about her equally patient process. Though often associated with the Pop Artists of the 1960s, Celmins’ work is equally indebted to Conceptualism.
Organized by The Menil Collection and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster 1964–1966 will be the first exhibition to concentrate on an important segment of Celmins’ art dictated by a specific time and subject matter. Recent survey exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou and the Metropolitan Museum of Art have concentrated on her drawings and prints respectively. With approximately fourteen paintings and two small sculptures, this exhibition, organized by Franklin Sirmans and Michelle White, is the first to look at this distinct period, from 1964–1968, in this important artist’s development.
Though Celmins often uses photographs from nature as source material, her early output reflects the mediated view of the first televised war. While several early images came from her own interest in painting common objects from the studio, such as the television itself or a lamp, this exhibition concentrates on images of war and the power (or lack thereof) of mediated representations. As the abundance of images continues to be maximized in the present, Celmins’ work from this pivotal time, reflects on the moment when the printed image gave way to the ubiquitous screen of the television, updated today with the computer.
This exhibition is co-organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Menil Collection, Houston.
The Los Angeles presentation was made possible in part by Laura and Jim Maslon.
Image: Vija Celmins Burning Man, 1966 Oil on canvas 20 x 22.5 inches Private Collection, New York
www.lacma.org
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