Influenced by minimalist artist Ad Reinhardt’s Twelve Rules for a New Academy 1953, Celmins started to consciously strip away elements in her art. While there is this cosmic sense of time in the elemental subject matter she works from, the subjects also allow the artist to explore the relationship between deep space and the flat surface of a picture. Shooting stars, turning planets and rippling oceans suggest movement and the passing of time in Celmins's images. The writer and curator Elita Ansone suggests that the spider’s web motif is related to the night skies images, commenting that 'each work represents a different feeling and a different image, as if each were a new galaxy.' Like the desert, lunar surfaces and galaxies Celmins has explored the spider’s web repeatedly.
When we see these works together our attention is drawn to proportion and scale as well as perspective. The web – like the night sky and desert floor – acts as a kind of map, as it describes the picture surface. The spider webs are viewed at the same angle and scale as they might be in nature. By pairing the night sky with an engineer's drawing of a ship or a view of desert floor, she creates a dialogue between two different approaches to perspective – or treatment of space – on the flat surface of a piece of paper.Ĭelmins’s artworks based on photographs of spider webs also offer a different sense of perspective to the night skies and deserts. This is another way of exploring three-dimensional space and scale. In works such as Untitled (Galaxy-Desert) 1974 and Alliance 1983 Celmins paired images together. Ceelmins was inspired by these images and began to use them in her work.
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On 20 July 1969 the spaceflight Apollo 11 landed on the moon and the media was full of dramatic images of outer space. The late 1960s saw the culmination of the great ‘space race’ between the Soviet Union and the USA. The first drawings she made using this type of imagery were based on photographs of planets and the surface of the moon. She was inspired by their experimentation with object size and scale, and their depiction of objects detached from their original function.Ĭelmins's early object paintings, alongside her interest in scientific imagery, led to her making drawings and prints of seas, night skies and deserts. Although Celmins’s work from this period is often discussed in relation to pop art, her ideas had more in common with the object paintings of artists such as René Magritte and Giorgio Morandi.
These artists – known as pop artists – were using these sources to comment on popular culture and the brash consumerism of the day. Other artists in the 1960s such as Andy Warhol and Richard Hamilton were also making paintings and prints of found objects and images. Around this time she was also making sculpture based on everyday functional objects. Her interest in images continued, and in the 1960s Celmins began using photographs she found in magazines and books as a source for her art.
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‘I had stacks of comics because I had sort of taught myself how to read, because I couldn’t speak English. As a young girl she moved with her parents from Latvia to Indianapolis in the USA and began collecting pictures from comic books and picture playing cards.
Vija Celmins was fascinated by images from an early age.
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