Vija Celmins’ retrospective is obvious

Vija Celmins’ paintings and drawings are soft, saturated and seemingly simple. Her curator of the retrospective curator at Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland seemed to have caught her tip: Despite the exhibition’s work of about 90 pieces, each room felt sparse. Even wall texts in three languages manage to be discrete in some way, hiding to the right of each piece.

Celmins’ parents were born in Riga in 1938 and fled the Soviet Union to enter Latvia to take refuge in Nazi Germany. There were only five Celmins at the time, recalling playing in the ruins of bombing buildings. The family moved to the United States in 1948 to spend their time in a UN refugee camp, supporting and sponsoring church services worldwide. The young Celmins speaks no English. In the midst of cultural shock, chaos and loneliness, she began drawing and gathering images from magazines and postcards.

After Celmins won the BFA in the 1960s at the Indiana BFA and the California MFA, she drew a series of modest still life from her first studio: a two-head lamp, a space heater, a hot plate, a hot plate, a gun in one hand, a gun, an open letter. These works betray the influence of Giorgio Morandi.

Celmins began drawing objects in 1964, e.g. envelope or Hot board, It seems to be lonely and independent – perhaps the feeling of isolation when the artist arrives in the United States. They feel lonely and idle and betray an artist who works in an internal world marked by constraints and introspection. A careful study of these work is to enter the world, look through her eyes, and share the quiet intensity required to produce detailed, realistic details. They possess an incredible silence, as if temporarily hung out of time – strange but alienated. These items are similar to consumer goods, but are deprived of vivid commercial energy, making Celmins’ Pop Art contemporaries animated works.

As the 1960s continued, Celmins’ palette became more severe and her subjects became more violent. Time magazine cover (1965) reproduces the 1965 cover in black and white, depicting the Los Angeles riot. Burning plane (1965), Flying Fort (1966), and Suspension aircraft (1966) depicts World War II-style bombers that dropped nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The ghost of violent conflict is Bikini (1968), a magazine drawing of a magazine edited the nuclear bomb test of Bikini Atoll. The combination of grayscale tones with the subtle texture of the canvas gives these works a granular mass that is evocative, but also memories, as if they were the artist’s hazy memories of war that she barely remembered, but it made her life indelible.

By the end of that decade, Celmins began a series of graphite maps of clouds, moon surfaces and waves. In the 1970s, she made a series of the night’s skies and the rough surfaces of the California desert. In these drawings, observation is both a science and a philosophical task. Although the works of the past decade examine the world from the alienation lens of outsiders, the works of the 1970s have chosen to withdraw completely from the human world of human things and turn to natural phenomena.

The world of small human affairs rarely appears in Celmins’ work over the next few decades. Before the late 1970s, however, she began bringing stones to her studio, casting them in bronze and painting the surfaces so that they look the same as the original works. 11 of these duplicates have been aggregated together in installation Repair images in memory I-XI (1977-82), showing the cast list with the original work next to it. They are meditations on real and false, real and replicate, shrewd and weird subjects, but most importantly, they are mean invitations to careful observation and careful learning. Of all the works on display by Beyeler, these are the ones that I and other visitors pay the most attention to, as we try to identify ourselves which stones are stones and which are copies of them.

In the 2000s, Celmins repeated the pairing gestures and found objects with handmade replicas. Blackboard Tableau #9 (2007-15) introduces two small blackboards that were once used in schools, one of which is a composition and a drawn copy of the original original. Unlike stone, these works evoke quiet melancholy, seemingly again anchoring the practice of Celmins in the emotional landscape of childhood – its trauma and its silence. Nevertheless, whether due to the artificial origins of objects or the melancholy halos, I find them less striking and lacking the metaphysical weight of natural forms. After all, there is more shocking in the act of copying nature itself – more bold, as if to rival God’s work.

The last room of the exhibition continues to be fascinated by Celmins’ long-lasting fascination with the surface. However, unlike some of her popular contemporaries, her interaction with the surface is nothing but superficial, which induces contemplation rather than emptiness, suggesting depth and continuous meditation. A room has a series of striking paintings that carefully depict the texture of its nominal objects: shell (2009–10), plate (2013–23), and vase (2017-18). However, the main theme in Celmins’ recent work is the night sky, which we think is a flat space, but in reality, it is an incredible deep space. She returns to this subject in a variety of ways that blur the line between light truth and abstraction, providing not only a technological feat, but also a confusing, almost meditation about scale, perception and human position within space and nature.

John Vincler uses the perspective of the climate crisis and his conception of the existence threat to humanity when reviewing her 2020 retrospective at Met Breuer. But I think Celmins’ job is to look backwards rather than forwards, to connect with audiences at the individual rather than collective level. Her persistent, almost obsessed scrutiny of natural phenomena is not only an aesthetic strategy, but also a way of negotiating alienation of early experiences. Through the patient, detailing the world’s strict behavior, Celmins invites us to see her see, perhaps in the process, closer to embracing her sensibility of meditating on her contemplation and reflection. Her image is quiet but persistent in expressing basic human desires: connection, seeing and understanding. In a sense, each object becomes a self-portrait, which is a mirror that reflects the indoor world. Really seeing them is something that knows her.