Vija Celmins
Vija Celmins ( Latvian Vija Celmiņa ; born October 25, 1938 in Riga , Latvia ) is an American draftsman , painter and graphic artist of Latvian descent.
life and work
Celmin's family fled to Germany from Red Army troops in 1944 . There they lived in a refugee camp in Esslingen am Neckar , where Vija also attended school. In 1949 the family moved to Indianapolis , United States. She studied art at the Herron School of Art and Design at Indiana University (BFA 1962) in Indianapolis. From 1962 to 1980 she lived in Venice , California . In 1964 she moved into a spacious studio on the Pacific Ocean and began to photograph the sea, photos that served as templates for numerous drawings and pictures. In the same year she created her realistic painting Gun with hand (oil on canvas). In 1965 she did her Masters (MFA) from the University of California, Los Angeles . Today she lives mostly in New York City .
Along with Audrey Flack, Celmins is considered to be the most important female member of the hyperrealistic trend and one of the most important living North American artists at all. In contrast to that colleague, her color palette is almost exclusively black-gray-white, in which she has achieved the highest mastery in the field of nuances of light and shadow over the decades. Her works are also shaped by a certain Baltic melancholy, even tragedy. In her nostalgia and her awareness of exile, Vija Celmins is, so to speak, “the” Jonas Mekas of her field.
In 2010 Celmins was awarded the Roswitha Haftmann Prize . In 1997 she was a MacArthur Fellow .
Exhibitions and awards
- 1961 Fellowship from Yale University
- 1968 Cassandra Foundation Award
- 1971 and 1976 Artist's Fellowship of the National Endowment for the Arts
- 1973 Whitney Museum of American Art , New York
- 1980 Guggenheim Fellowship
- 1992 Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia
- 1994 Institute of Contemporary Art, London
- 1996 member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
- 1997 Vija Celmin's retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art , Frankfurt am Main
- 1998 member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- 2002 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt am Main
- 2004 elected member ( NA ) of the National Academy of Design , New York
- 2006 Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Center Pompidou , Paris
- 2009 Roswitha Haftmann Prize
- 2011 Vija Celmins: Desert, Sea and Stars , Museum Ludwig , Cologne
- 2015/2016 Secession , Vienna
- 2017 documenta 14 , Kassel
- 2019 Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory ( retrospective ), Met Breuer , New York
Web links
- Literature by and about Vija Celmins in the catalog of the German National Library
- Vija Celmins at artfacts.net
- Biography and selection of works at Tate Gallery
- Exhibition Vija Celmins. Desert, sea and stars from April 15 to July 17, 2011 in the Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Individual evidence
- ↑ Jean Christophe Ammann: The happiness to see , on the work of Vija Celmins , p. 114 ff, Lindinger + Schmid, 1998 ISBN 3-929970-35-X
- ↑ Academy Members. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed January 11, 2019 .
- ↑ nationalacademy.org: Living Academicians "C" / Celmins, Vija, NA 2004 ( Memento of the original from March 20, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (accessed June 17, 2015)
- ↑ Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory , accessed October 22, 2019
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Celmins, Vija |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Celmiņa, Vija |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Latvian-US draftsman and painter |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 25, 1938 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Riga , Latvia |