Prints 1983 to 1985

Matthew Marks is pleased to present Vija Celmins: Prints 1983 to 1985. The exhibition includes many of her best prints, which were made during this especially protean moment in Celmins’s career. Celmins first studied printmaking as a student in the early 1960s, and over the course of a six-decade career has proven a master printmaker, employing a wide range of techniques, including engraving, drypoint, woodcut, mezzotint, and aquatint. Through her facility with these techniques, Celmins’s mark making achieves an extraordinary spectrum of subtly rendered lines and tones. The prints in the exhibition reflect Celmins’s enduring fascination with the world around her. The artist’s ocean prints are based on photographs she captured in 1969 from the pier near her studio in Venice, California. Celmins carefully crops the shore and horizon to create an unbroken allover composition that seems to extend in every direction. In her Concentric Bearings series, Celmins brings together multiple printing plates on a single sheet of paper to create provocative juxtapositions, combining motifs ranging from night skies to airplanes to a Marcel Duchamp sculpture. In Strata (1983), Celmins combines twenty-five individual copper plates to depict a multitude of densely packed stars in a dark night sky. Some stars are rendered with a hazy focus while others are crisply defined, ranging in size from miniscule dots to larger circles of glowing white. “I like to work with impossible images,” Celmins has said, “impossible because they are nonspecific, too big, spaces unbound.” Vija Celmins (b. 1938) was born in Latvia and immigrated to the United States with her family in the late 1940s. She studied at the John Herron School of Art in Indiana and at Yale University before moving to Los Angeles in 1962 to pursue a master’s degree at UCLA. Celmins remained in Los Angeles until 1981, when she moved to New York, where she currently lives and works. She has had one-person exhibitions at numerous museums, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Menil Collection in Houston. In 2002, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York organized the exhibition “Vija Celmins: Prints, 1962–2002,” and in 2015 the Vienna Secession presented an exhibition of her complete prints.