Art Gallery Of Ontario

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