Vija Celmins: 4 Decades

Streaming video - 2007

Vija Celmins is one of the most important artists of the postwar generation. She is best known for her drawings of the ocean and the galaxies of the night sky. These brilliant works were mostly realized during a seventeen year period when she stopped painting altogether in order to explore drawing. In her forty year retrospective at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles she recalls her beginnings in abstraction, her choices of subject matter after she freed herself of the New York School influence, and her later immersion in what must be termed her great master drawings.