Vija Celmins
Spends years on a single drawing of the sea, or the night sky, or a spider's web.
Vija Celmins was born in Riga in 1938 and reached the United States as a refugee at ten, having spent the end of the war in German camps. After early paintings of studio objects and of war imagery taken from magazines, she began in the late 1960s the work she has continued since: extremely dense, extremely slow renderings of surfaces without a horizon or a centre — the ocean, the desert floor, the night sky, a spider's web — worked from photographs in graphite, charcoal or oil, at a scale close to the source. A drawing can take a year. She has lived in New York since 1981.
Scarcity defines this market: the output is genuinely small because of how the work is made, and demand is not. Graphite drawings on prepared paper are the core, and their surfaces are unusually vulnerable — they cannot be cleaned, they burnish, and any abrasion is permanent, so condition and framing history bear on value more than for almost any comparable artist. Celmins is also a serious printmaker, working in mezzotint, aquatint and woodcut with Gemini G.E.L. and others, in small editions that are catalogued and well documented.
If you own a work by Vija Celmins
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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