Art Gallery Of Ontario

Vija Celmins: You're looking at a painting called The Heater, a painting I did in 1964. I was in graduate school, UCLA, about 24 years old. I was floundering around in my painting. Doing mostly abstract expressionist painting, and I fell into this period where I was throwing away a lot of ideas. So I started painting these simple paintings of objects in my studio. Like the heater you see here, and my lamps. I painted my refrigerator, all the food. And the idea was that I wanted to kind of quiet down and just look and paint. Like eye to brain. Tony Berlant: The irony to me always with Vija is the understated small quietness is so dramatic and engulfing. Especially during a period when people were making big, gestural, abstract, muscular paintings. She always felt that the rules did not apply to her.

Gary Garrels: In some cases, Celmins spends years working on a single work. It goes through a long process of looking, changing, looking again. Thinking about it, remembering. A relationship develops, I think, between Celmins and the work so that it becomes a very living experience. Vija Celmins: I had done this little tiny painting in 1986. The woman who owned the painting died and I got the painting back, which hardly ever happens, which is so great. Nancy Lim: She hadn't made paintings of the ocean in a really long time. Vija Celmins: So sometimes you see a work you've done a long time ago and you forgot that maybe it was, kind of had some terrific qualities to it. Uh, but I had it in my studio and I thought, “Oh my gosh! What a great image, a complicated image.” I was like almost 30 years older. And I wanted to see if I could do it again. So I did it again. So this work is the same image done with a totally different kind of beginning every time. Different colors, different time, different age.

Nancy Lim: Celmins began making permutations of the Night Sky in 2000, reversing the color schema of her Night Skies. So instead of white stars on a black background, she did the opposite: black stars painted onto a white field. Vija Celmins: So it has such a different, different space. I don't think it's a very object-like painting anymore. The space is much more ambiguous. You can maybe go into it a little bit. It's a little dreamier. Gary Garrels: The Reverse Night Skies also allow a wonderful little bit of color to come into the work. And they have a kind of sense of hovering presence, of something that is more ethereal, more indeterminate, more open. Vija Celmins: It's like a new set of things for me to try to solve. So I emphasized the edges to emphasize a little bit that I know about the restrictions of this space. That it's not quite an object, but sort of made into –like let's not go and dream out to the walls. Let's stop here. My whole career, I have gone between object, image of object,

Gary Garrels: I have to say, I became obsessed by this painting and continue to think about it over and over again. For me, it's one of her most beautiful paintings. One begins to understand the sense of time that's embedded in it. Vija Celmins: It's a painting and it's also like an object, like the book itself is sort of pushing on the edges of the painting. And it's about the same size and it gave me a chance to indulge in using blues. I found these Japanese books when I had a show in Tokyo, and I found them in a used kind of pile on the floor in a flea market. Nancy Lim: Every crack and fold and worn away edge is re-described. So you see a sliver of shadow along the right hand side of the book, a little bit along the bottom, as well as the left edge. And so you recognize that's a very thin book sitting on top of the canvas. Gary Garrels: There's a sense that it's been in someone's possession where the surface has been rubbed and stressed and deteriorated. So it becomes a record of a lived life. And

Nancy Lim: In the 2000s, Celmins returned to making objects, including this set of blackboards. There are three found tablets, and seven made tablets. Gary Garrels: I find them entrancing because you really slow down and try to determine which one is the original, the found object, and which one is the one that's been created. And I must say, I still find it extremely difficult to figure out which one is which. Vija Celmins: I had moved my studio out in the country and I was beginning to see some old stuff in used junk stores, and kind of waking up to it. Many of the blackboards seemed to be about a hundred years old. And they had all these scratches and all this kind of, what I would say romantic atmosphere to it, which I would not allow myself to do in my own work, but which I could mimic now in doing the blackboards. So I went on a little blackboard craze. I must have done about twenty. Gary Garrels: Blackboards are a way that we bring something into our memory—that, you know, by writing something on

Vija Celmins: I think I just came upon this photograph of a web and I was thinking, “My God, this guy, the spider, was, you know, doing my drawings, reflecting a beautiful two-dimensional plane.” Nancy Lim: She found this image in the early 1990s. One of the things that she liked about it was that it felt a little bit lonely and she's always liked that quality in her source images. Tony Berlant: They're very seductive in making you want to look at them. It's understated, but it is that Vija thing of drawing you in. Vija Celmins: I found myself sort of remembering about lines. I'm not a line person. You know, I'm a mass person. I kind of organize masses. Nancy Lim: She realized there was something too exciting about the spider web. You know, its connotations of despair and of breaking down and of age. There was something that seemed so sensational, she wanted to leave all of that behind. Vija Celmins: I wanted the images to stay more bland so you would focus more on really how they were made or ho

Vija Celmins: Hubble is a little drawing I did for NASA. They wanted to think that artists were interested in space, which I think a lot of artists are. But I'm not interested in illustrating space or anything. I'm interested in just an image that I, myself, can very subtly manipulate and fit in this new reality, which is right in front of me. I got to go see NASA in Florida and where they send off the rockets, which was a really fine thing to see. I made it, I gave it to Hubble, then I made it again, which I often like to do. What was interesting was trying to make a work that was black. Very interesting, very hard. Paintings tend to be very closed off, they're all on the surface. The drawings let you in a little bit more, and I have put the charcoal on with my hands. Normal—I like very thin charcoal, real pieces of charcoal. And then, the the image has been made by erasure. Because the charcoal is just dust, you know. So it's very easy to erase.

Gary Garrels: In the 1990s, the night sky was the primary subject in Celmins work and she made several paintings over several years of different variants of the night sky. Some are incredibly deep, dense, dark, and others become very luminous. Vija Celmins: I like that I was making this thing that wanted to be a deep space and that you desire to go into this painting. You have a desire for the depth because you know in your head that this outer space and I have put a stop to the space by making something kind of flat, you know? They've been painted over and over and over. I was trying to get a feeling of some kind of mass in the work and some kind of a feeling of weight, and they are kind of heavy feeling paintings. They're also paintings that change as you go up to them. Because from far away, they're only proportion, you know, you see black proportion. And when you get close to them, you begin to see the image, and hopefully you have a kind of a surprise. So I like the idea that actually the space in

Nancy Lim: In 1973, Celmins rented a house in a small New Mexico town and was looking every night at the night sky. So it was a combination of that experience with finding satellite pictures of the Coma Berenices and Cassiopeia constellations that resulted in this series. Vija Celmins: These are kind of places that really don't exist except in your mind because we have only seen them in photographs. You can see that there is a central event that I sometimes veer toward, but most of them are fields. For a while I thought I would try to put an event in like a little comet, but I was not so satisfied with that. I was building up a lot of graphite on the paper and moving into loving the graphite more than the image. I think you see, looking at the graphite that I get denser and denser and denser with it. What I did here is, these drawings are all additions, and the white is all the paper. I don't really think of them as stars. I mean, they’re stars, but not stars. I think of them like undetonated kind of

Nancy Lim: What you're looking at here is To Fix the Image in Memory. You can see that there are 22 stones. 11 of them are found, and 11 of them are bronze casts that she painted. Vija Celmins: Usually, when people look at this piece, they have no idea what they're looking at. Some people thought that I had found two stones that look exactly the same. And they ask me where I found those. So there's an element, I think, of inviting you to look. And a sort of an element of surprise and maybe a chuckle. Tony Berlant: Well, I think that the rocks she makes feel more inhabited than the rocks that are a natural object. And even if I couldn't quickly tell you which one is which, it calls to mind that this is a creation. Vija Celmins: For me, as the artist, the making is the meaning. It was a meditation on really how much I could see. And sort of a meditation of looking at nature. This piece took about four to five years. Of course, I didn't work on it all the time. I never work all the time. I work, I stop, I w

Vija Celmins: I found this little piece of wood out on the dunes in the middle of Death Valley in California, which had little cracks on it and it was so dry. And I put it in my pocket. Later, when I came back to New York, I took it out and it had this very wonderful quality of fineness—the cracks were so tiny. And I thought that I might try to make a painting that had that surface on it. You know, sometimes you have like moments when everything comes together. This is one of those moments. It's like a little inspirational moment. And then, what you have to do is you have to prolong that moment all of that time that it takes to make the painting. It’s a painting you really have to relate to walking toward it. Getting very, very close, you see how very handmade it is. Then stepping back a little bit it, it just crystallizes together. And then, the part that's the desert is just like a ghost that hovers behind it. But the real experience is right there in the gallery between the viewer and the painting.

Introduction Vija Celmins: Maybe what I would like is the viewer to have an experience that is a sort of a waking up experience like drawing in a breath and saying, “Oh!” Nancy Lim: Welcome to the audio guide for Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory. I'm Nancy Lim, assistant curator of painting and sculpture here at SFMOMA. Gary Garrels: I'm Gary Garrels, the Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA. This is an exhibition I've been thinking about and planning and working on for almost 10 years and I hope you will find it as engaging as I have. Nancy Lim: We'll also be hearing from Celmins' longtime friend and fellow artist Tony Berlant. Tony Berlant: I think I first met Vija around 1962. She was just so technically accomplished. Vija Celmins: Most of my work and the images I work with come from my own ordinary life activities. I’m not a symbolic painter or political painter, I don’t have any real big message in that way. It’s a looking experience.

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