On Friday, 11th April, 5 pm The Latvian National Museum of Art will open an exhibition of almost 50 works by the world’s most famous Latvian painter Vija Celmins at the The Art Museum Riga Bourse the Great Exhibition Hall as part of the Riga European Capital of Culture programme.
Works for the exhibition “Double Reality” have come from the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Art Gallery in Washington, US embassy in Latvia, McKee gallery, Frankfurt am Main Art Museum, the Foundation Cartier Centre for Contemporary Arts in Paris, the Latvian National Museum of Art and from Vija Celmins own collection.
Vija Celmins (1938) was born in Riga but in 1944 she and her family became refugees. She emigrated to the USA in 1948, settling in Indiana in 1949. From 1963 – 1981 she lived and worked in Los Angeles. In 1981 she moved to New York.
We can say the exhibition will give viewers the opportunity to see the artist’s art over a fifty year period because the oldest work, Gun with Hand, was painted in 1964. It tells of the artist’s political activism in the 1960s when young artists were ready to protest against any kind of violence.
Celmins is also famous for her sculpture of the two metres long wooden comb. This pop art period can also be seen in several of the artist’s works on show. In the 1960s Celmins depicted everyday items that were to be found in her ascetic studio in Venice, California. Visitors will be able to see surreally hypertrophied sculptures of erasers and pencils. There is also a table lamp painted with two bulbs like eyes.
In the 1970s the ocean, desert and stars became the main themes in the artist’s portfolio. Later, at the end of the 1990s, the artist also revealed the fragile and perfect structure of the spider’s web. Celmins continues to depict these natural structures. She has painted them, drawn them in graphite and charcoal, produced mezzotints, aquatints and lithographs. This is all in the attempt to see how far she can go in technical perfection.
Vija Celmins dedicated five years of her creative work (1977-1982) to “stone works”. She cast stones gathered in the desert in bronze. Two works from this series – one real and one painted bronze – will be on show in the exhibition. Conceptual intellectualism in Celmins’ art is also manifested in her polyptychs in which two or three different images are included in one work, requiring the viewer to compare the scale of the space, the closeness or distance.
Exhibition curator: Elita Ansone
Join the press conference on 11th April 10 am at the conference hall of The Art Museum Riga Bourse (6 Doma Square, Riga) with Mara Lace, Diana Čivle, Elita Ansone, Antra Cilinska and the artist.
