“Lately I have been painting a work over and over... sanding it off and painting it again on top of itself. Same image over and over. Actually I tend to end up with a simple-looking single image that may have six months of work under it... it lets you in for a little bit and you think you may be seeing something that isn't there. The black night sky paintings are especially hard to penetrate.”
Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York / Art Resource, NY. Art © 2020 Vija Celmins, Courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery
collects ion of SFMOMA. Art © 2020 Vija Celmins, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery
Elegant, ethereal, and enigmatic, Vija Celmins’ mesmerizing Night Sky #7 from 1995 represents a paradigmatic expression of the artist’s aesthetically simplified yet theoretically laden practice. Acquired nearly a quarter of a century ago from McKee Gallery in New York, the importance of the present work is attested to by its inclusion in the New York leg of the artist’s major 2019 retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, alongside many of her best-known pieces. One of the largest Night Sky paintings, #7 takes its place alongside similar works in such prestigious collects ions as The Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Coming of age against a backdrop of Action and Color Field Painting, and concurrent with the emergence of Pop and Conceptual Art, Celmins maintained a singular artistic voice, set apart from her peers by her interest in the image as object and her resolute commitment to draftsmanship. Throughout her unique and celebrated career, she has returned again and again to the same motifs, redescribings the night sky, ocean waves, and desert sands in an ongoing exploration of the way we see. In Night Sky #7, the eye is first seduced, drawn inward to the infinite depths of space, and then rebuffed, kept out at the last moment by the flatness of the picture plane. The velvety blacks of the surface are layered, one after another, creating both literal and metaphorical depth, here and there illuminated by pinpricks of white light, shimmering through a field of lush darkness. From a distance, Celmins’ work can look like a photograph, while up close, the subtleties of her touch complicate the surface and reassert the presence of the artist’s hand. Celmins’ meticulous, meditative process here results in a painterly type of magical realism, as her canvas hovers at the edge between legibility and obscurity, intimacy and distance, mimesis and imagination.
VIJA CELMINS’ CONSTELLATION PAINTINGS IN PROMINENT collects IONS
collects ion of SFMOMA. Art © 2020 Estate of Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Right: Yayoi Kusama, No. F, 1959
Museum of Modern Art, New York. Art © Yayoi Kusama
Celmins’ depictions of the night sky represent a crucial theoretical benchmark for the artist, and as such are also perhaps her most emblematic works. Her early realist paintings of household objects in the 1960s prompted comparisons with the work of Gerhard Richter, and served as an important foundation for her technical mastery and career-long focus on intricately rendered surfaces. Like Richter, she has painted from news clippings and photographic references, taking the image of the image as her subject, but her immersive attention to detail, defamiliarizing a surface to emphasize its texture, often straying from the source image, has differentiated her work. By 1968, Celmins had shifted her interest from specific objects to the natural world, taking on what she has described as “impossible images, impossible because they are non-specific, too big, spaces unbound.” (The artist quoted in: Jeanne Silverthorne, “Vija Celmins in Conversation,” Parkett 44, July 1995, p. 40) The next decade saw Celmins focus almost entirely on graphite and charcoal drawings of galaxies, waves, and sands, until her return to painting in the 1980s. Feeling that oil on canvas carried more weight, she revisited the same images but, through her careful and structured method of layering paint on paint, she added the illusory, Rothko-like depth that characterizes works like Night Sky #7, in which the infinity of space seems to collapse into a single two-dimensional plane.
Private collects ion. Sold Replica Shoes ’s London in October 2015 for $24.7 million. Art © 2020 Fondation Lucio Fontana / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Assiduously worked and exquisitely finished, Night Sky #7 represents the epit.mes of Celmins’ exhaustive and punctilious process, infusing found images with new life. Drawing from photographic sources but never copying the images exactly, she begins with pictures from astronomy books and journals, cropped and proportioned to her liking, then translates the initial image onto a prepared canvas. She then sands down the surface and paints over it again, repeating this process twenty t.mes s or more, each t.mes moving further and further from the original photograph. Celmins often speaks of “building” her paintings, constructing them with each successive layer of paint in the way one builds a house from its foundation upwards. This process bears comparison to the wax emulsion paintings of Brice Marden, started in the 1970s, where the artist created a mixture of wax, oil paint and turpentine and applied it in many thin layers to the surface of the canvas, creating an extraordinary richness of color and an unusual matte surface not dissimilar to that of the present work. Further allying the two artists’ process, both allow the layers of paint to thin towards the edges of the canvas, as if to expose the palimpsest that constitutes their creation. As the white and black of Night Sky #7 develop together, some of the stars become more nebulous than others, having been only partially erased or repainted by the succeeding layer, creating a range of tonal variations in which the celestial clusters appear to emit varying levels of brightness, thereby implying a range of distances from Earth. As the artist explains, “Lately I have been painting a work over and over... sanding it off and painting it again on top of itself. Same image over and over. Actually I tend to end up with a simple-looking single image that may have six months of work under it... it lets you in for a little bit and you think you may be seeing something that isn't there. The black night sky paintings are especially hard to penetrate.” (The artist quoted in: Bryony Fer, et. al., Vija Celmins, New York 2004, p. 10) Given the nature of her prolonged and studious process, Celmins will often work on a single painting for more than a year. As purposeful pent.mes nti, canvases like Night Sky #7 contain a type of memory, their silent surfaces bearing fossil-like traces from rich histories of mark-making.
Much like a memory, Celmins’ starscape is at once closely personal and yet necessarily removed from us. The surface invites close inspection, as each touch and gesture remain visible, reminding the viewer that this is a work of art made by an artist’s hand, yet inseparable from the surface as a whole, rephrasing the vastness of space onto an intimate scale. Even so, this vastness is emphasized by her careful cropping: with no horizon, no focal point, we become lost in the looming abstraction, as the image expands away from us, beyond the canvas, in unknown directions. This push-and-pull between the intimate and the distant, a central conceptual tenet in Celmins’ work, imbues Night Sky #7 with a mysterious familiar magnetism, like a half-remembered dream or childhood fairytale, that keeps us searching, enthralled, for the secret held in its grasp.
