Vija Celmins valuation
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.
What a work by Vija Celmins is worth
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Bio
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.
At a glance
- Born
- 1938, Riga
To Fix the Image in Memory
In the late 1970s and early 1980s Celmins made a series of stones she had picked up along the Rio Grande in New Mexico, each shown beside a bronze cast of itself painted so closely to match that the two can hardly be told apart; the Museum of Modern Art holds eleven. Her retrospective took its title from the work, To Fix the Image in Memory, and opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2018 before travelling to Toronto and to the Met Breuer in New York.
From around 2000 the spider webs joined the ocean, desert and night sky as subjects. Titles usually name the subject with a number, and the title with the date and medium is what identifies a drawing or print.
Indianapolis, Venice and the Praemium Imperiale
After the war the family lived in a Latvian refugee camp at Esslingen am Neckar before resettling in Indianapolis in 1948. She studied at the John Herron School of Art there, met Chuck Close and Brice Marden at a Yale summer school in 1961, and took her MFA at UCLA in 1965, living and working in Venice, Los Angeles, until 1980. Her paintings and pop sculptures of 1964 to 1966, of household objects, war planes and guns, were the subject of an exhibition organised by the Menil Collection with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2010.
Her thirty-year retrospective at the ICA in London in 1996 led The Independent to call her American art's best-kept secret. When McKee Gallery in New York, her dealer for many years, closed in 2015 she moved to Matthew Marks. Her woodcuts of water can take a year to cut, and in 2023 she received the Praemium Imperiale for painting.
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