Infinite expanses open before looking: stars overhable as white dots, sparkling bundles of rays or spots of lights blurring the darkness of the images of vija Celmins. But before you can get lost in the illusion of the space, you can look back on the surface of the works in a small or large format. Sometimes the artist composed her out of tiny pencil lines, which give the gray-black around the bright recesses a finely differentiated shine, sometimes made with a rotten coal in a no less minute way of working, sometimes with oil paint, which only increases the light darkness of the non-colored black and white by barely perceptible traces of blue or ocher.
“Impossible pictures”
Since a stay in the New Mexicos desert more than fifty years ago, the artist, born in Lithuania in 1938, has been painting the night sky – not the Romantics' firmament, which was shot with her own eyes, but pictures after satellite recordings. VIJA Celmins precisely observed the position of every visually recorded star in their subsequent exhaustion.
The unlimited space purrs together to a limited area, the incredible is brought to the view on canvases and leaves. Time plays an important role in this: to capture the light of stars that may long since gone out to visually in their own way, the artist has often been busy with individual work for years. They are meditations about the nature of “impossible pictures”, as she calls it that make up the core of her work – and are now at the center of her great retrospective in the Fondation Beyeler.
The museum presents around ninety works from all creative phases – paintings and drawings, especially some three -dimensional objects and graphics. This is a considerable number, as the artist did not make more than around 220 works.
There is no lack of recognition for this highly concentrated oeuvre. Vija Celmins is represented in important museums and private collections and was recognized with solo exhibitions from the Whitney Museum in New York, the Center Pompidou in Paris or the Ludwig Museum in Cologne. The selection in the Fondation Beyeler, in which the artist was involved, is now carried out by VIJA Celmins' development from the 1960s to the present.
The sunny is not her
It was contemporary and timeless at the same time from the start. When the pop art in bright colors exploded in the United States and in California the beach boys provided for the accompanying music for the candy-colored surfing culture, the artist painted a heater in her studio in the Venice Beach of Los Angeles Stille's Stilles district: a lamp with two shields that look like staring eyes, in which it glows threatening. Vija Celmins had studied art in Indianapolis, where she grew up and at the University of California. Now she was looking for her own expression.
The fact that the sunny did not lay her can be justified biographically. With her family, Vija Celmins fled from Riga in front of the Red Army in 1945 via Poland to Germany and emigrated to America three years later. The horrors of the war in paintings, which they created in the mid -1960s according to newspaper pictures: the crashed combat aircraft and “The Los Angeles Riot” are the scary's scary subjects of these pictures that, dominated by gray tones, are reminiscent of Andy Warhol's “Death and Disaster”. The painting of Giorgio Morandi, Diego Velázquez and Giotto, which she met on a trip to Europe, included Vija Celmins' permanent influences in this period.
Burning Man ”, the picture of a man who freed himself from the red flame inferno of a burning car marked her departure of strong colors and figurative representations. Inspired by the moon landing, she created drawings according to photos of the surface of the earth's trabant: abstract and objective at the same time, without recognizable composition or individual ducks. continued.
Each of your works is an invitation to take a closer look. This applies to their cloud images or views of water surfaces that let Gerhard Richter think, as well as for pictures of the desert floor or the starry sky. Each representation is an excerpt from a width that extends beyond the image boundaries – and the image of an image: a double, a replica, a copy, so to speak.
Original and copy
With her object art, which is less to be understood as a plastic than three -dimensional painting, VIJA Celmins drives this irritation to the extreme. In this way, she shapes gravel stones, lets it pour into bronze and paints it in detail according to the role models until a distinction between original and subsequent threading is no longer possible. “Hold the picture in memory” she calls such a group of workers created from 1972 to 1982 on a small scale. In the 1990s, she also moves close to the ceramic surfaces with black and white pictures of spider networks or in earthy tones.
Heinrich von Kleist said about Caspar David Friedrich's painting of the “Mönch am Meer”, you can see, “as if the eyelids were cut away”. The same applies to VIJA Celmin's pictures, which, however, do not show soul landscapes and have long excluded human presence. Therefore, they radiate great loneliness and silence, including the closeness to death. The snow in white flakes falls silent with a black background in the latest paintings by the artist. Constellations dissolve in a cocks of chance.
After all, it is a small stroke of genius of the exhibition to present the audience personally to the audience with the work of an artist who keeps so much distance in her work – also to world events – VIJA Celmins. The two filmmakers Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine visited them in New York and the Hamptons, where she now lives and works, and drew a background, quite amusing portrait in thirty minutes with the camera. We see a woman who does not like to give insights but lets herself be persuaded to answer questions that work slowly and quickly drives a car, actually find no red in the color cabinet, search the sky with an astronomy app and has ghosts of paintings on the wall.
Is it true that they want to create the image of an explosion? The artist smiles and does not reveal anything. The only thing that is certain is that even such a picture would evoke absolute calm in a paradoxical way, because in him the time would come to a standstill. In this regard, VIJA Celmins' early picture of an isolated hand that fires a pistol, and their star hinges, in which everything goes back to the Big Bang, are not as far apart from each other.
Vija CelminsFondation Beyeler, Riehen; until September 21. The catalog costs 58 euros.
