Vija Celmins | CI08 Life on Mars

Born: 1938, Riga, Latvia
Lives and Works: New York City

Characteristically rendered in muted tones, blacks, and whites, Vija Celmins' paintings and drawings explore the farthest reaches of restraint and representation. Her art seeks to understand the limits of human experience through imagery that points toward uninhabitable, desolate, and unbound beauty--the ocean, the desert, and the night sky are subjects that appear repeatedly in her paintings. Yet it is photographs rather than actual natural expanses that form the direct basis for her work. The Night Sky paintings derive from details of flat pages from magazines--the horizonless starry depths have been imperfectly "scanned" and translated by Celmins onto the canvas in a way that implies a seductively held tension of surface and depth, detail and illusion. In a process the artist has compared to masonry or brickwork, she laboriously deposits and constructs, sands, or erases the monochromatic pigments "to fix the image in the memory." The Night Sky works openly invite myriad connotations from philosophical meditations on humanity's place in the cosmos to starry allusions to the "final frontier" in television and cinema.

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Life on Mars, the 2008 Carnegie International

Widely known as one of the pre-eminent international surveys of contemporary art in the world, the Carnegie International was founded at the behest of industrialist Andrew Carnegie in 1896. With the Venice Biennale, the Carnegie International is the oldest such exhibition in the world. Titled "Life on Mars", the 2008 Carnegie International will focus on the increasingly relevant question of what it means to be human in the world today. The exhibition presents work by 40 artists who investigate particular aspects of the human condition, moving along paths that are both introspective and worldly while poetically traversing the dramatic spectrum from tragedy to comedy.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Art
• Carnegie
• International
• CI08
• Museum
• Carnegie-International

[teddy4970]

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