Vija Celmins was born on October 25, 1938, in Riga Latvia. Upon the Soviet occupation of Latvia in 1940, her parents and older sister Inta fled to Germany , surviving the refugee-despising Nazi regime, living in a United Nations supported Latvian refugee camp in Esslingen am Necker,Baden-Wurttemberg . After World War 2, in 1948 the Church World Service relocated the family to the United states, briefly in New York City, then on to Indianapolis, Indiana. Sponsored by a local Lutheran church,her father found work as a carpenter, and her mother in a hospital laundry.Vija was ten, and spoke no English, which caused her to focus on drawing, leading her teachers to encourage further creativity and painting.
Vija Celmins is an important Latvian-American, abstract-realism visual artist. Best known for photo-realistic paintings and drawings of natural environments: the ocean, spider webs, star fields and rocks. Her earlier work included pop sculptures and monochromatic representational painting. Based in New York City, she has been the subject of over forty solo exhibitions since 1965, and major retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American art,Los Angeles museum of Art, institute of Contemporary Arts, London, and Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Working in California in the 1960s, Vija Celmins' early work, generally in photorealistic painting and pop-inspired sculpture, was representational. She recreated commonplace objects such as TVs, lamps, pencils, erasers, and the painted monochrome reproductions of photographs. A common underlying theme in the paintings was violence or conflict, such as war planes, handguns and riot imagery. A retrospective of the 1964-1966 work was organised by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2011. She has cited Malcolm Morley and Jasper Johns as influences in this period.
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