As I’ve confined myself to my workspace at home as so many others across the world have done over the past months, my thoughts often traveled back to an amazing group of works that were recently assembled at the MET Breuer for the last venue of the exhibition tour of Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory, a retrospective we co-organized with colleagues SFMOMA.
As I’ve confined myself to my workspace at home as so many others across the world have done over the past months, my thoughts often traveled back to an amazing group of works that were recently assembled at the MET Breuer for the last venue of the exhibition tour of Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory, a retrospective we co-organized with colleagues SFMOMA. On the Breuer’s fifth floor Vija Celmins and I installed a number of works she made in her small studio in Venice Beach following her graduation from UCLA in the early 1960s. Alongside wonderful still life paintings of objects that surrounded her in that space—a space heater, a hot plate, a desk lamp—set against neutral gray backgrounds, the artist would occasionally take a break from two-dimensional works to make sculpture. Like all three-dimensional works from throughout her career, this utterly charming, larger-than-life, Pink Pearl eraser from the Hill Collection is carefully modeled in balsa wood and painted to replicate the surface of the original—an artist’s tool that would have been lying around the studio and that bears the marks of its implemental use. Each of the six pink erasers Celmins made in these years is slightly different, some with a fingerprint or the mark of a fingernail, one more worn around its edge with use than others, and each one totally unique in its special verisimilitude. They speak to the intimate work of the artist, the joy of her tools, and the possibility for sculpture to redescribe the world around us and make us look at it with new wonderment at a different view
As I’ve confined myself to my workspace at home as so many others across the world have done over the past months, my thoughts often traveled back to an amazing group of works that were recently assembled at the MET Breuer for the last venue of the exhibition tour of Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory, a retrospective we co-organized with colleagues SFMOMA.
As I’ve confined myself to my workspace at home as so many others across the world have done over the past months, my thoughts often traveled back to an amazing group of works that were recently assembled at the MET Breuer for the last venue of the exhibition tour of Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory, a retrospective we co-organized with colleagues SFMOMA. On the Breuer’s fifth floor Vija Celmins and I installed a number of works she made in her small studio in Venice Beach following her graduation from UCLA in the early 1960s. Alongside wonderful still life paintings of objects that surrounded her in that space—a space heater, a hot plate, a desk lamp—set against neutral gray backgrounds, the artist would occasionally take a break from two-dimensional works to make sculpture. Like all three-dimensional works from throughout her career, this utterly charming, larger-than-life, Pink Pearl eraser from the Hill Collection is carefully modeled in balsa wood and painted to replicate the surface of the original—an artist’s tool that would have been lying around the studio and that bears the marks of its implemental use. Each of the six pink erasers Celmins made in these years is slightly different, some with a fingerprint or the mark of a fingernail, one more worn around its edge with use than others, and each one totally unique in its special verisimilitude. They speak to the intimate work of the artist, the joy of her tools, and the possibility for sculpture to redescribe the world around us and make us look at it with new wonderment at a different view