Retrospective of Vija Celmins at the Fondation Beyeler

Endless expanses open before the gaze: stars dot the darkness of Vija Celmins's paintings as white dots, sparkling four-pointed beams, or patches of light blur. But before one can lose oneself in the illusion of space, a closer look throws one back onto the surface of the works, whether small or large. Sometimes the artist composes them with tiny pencil strokes that lend the gray-black surrounding the light recesses a finely differentiated luster; sometimes with richer charcoal and no less meticulous technique; sometimes with oil paint, which, with barely perceptible traces of blue or ochre, only intensifies the chiaroscuro of the non-colors of black and white.

Since a stay in the New Mexico desert more than fifty years ago, the artist, born in Lithuania in 1938, has been drawing and painting the night sky—not the firmament seen with her own eyes by the Romantics, however, but rather images based on satellite photographs. In her re-creations, Vija Celmins precisely observes the position of every optically recorded celestial body.

Boundless space shrinks into a limited area, the incomprehensible becomes tangible on canvases and sheets of paper. Time plays a crucial role here: To visually capture the light of stars that may have long since gone out, the artist often spends years working on individual works. Meditations on the nature of "impossible images," as she calls them, constitute the core of her work—and are now the focus of her major retrospective at the Fondation Beyeler.

The museum presents around 90 works from all phases of her career—primarily paintings and drawings, as well as some three-dimensional objects and prints. This is a remarkable number, considering the artist created no more than about 220 works in total.

There is no lack of recognition for this highly concentrated oeuvre. Vija Celmins is represented in major museums and private collections and has been honored with solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. The selection at the Fondation Beyeler, in which the artist participated, now traces Vija Celmins' development chronologically from the 1960s to the present.

She was both contemporary and timeless from the very beginning. When Pop Art exploded in bright colors in the USA and the Beach Boys provided the background music for the candy-colored surfer culture in California, the artist painted still lifes in shades of gray in her studio in the Venice Beach district of Los Angeles: a lamp with two shades resembling staring eyes, a space heater glowing ominously. Vija Celmins had studied art in Indianapolis, where she grew up, and at the University of California. Now she was searching for her own expression.

Her biographical background explains why she didn't have a knack for sunny painting. In 1945, Vija Celmins and her family fled from Riga to escape the Red Army, via Poland to Germany, and three years later, she emigrated to America. The horrors of war resonate in the paintings she created in the mid-1960s based on newspaper images: crashed fighter planes and "The Los Angeles Riot" are the eerily contemporary subjects of these pictures, which, dominated by shades of gray, are reminiscent of Andy Warhol's "Death and Disaster" series. Vija Celmins' lasting influences during this period included the paintings of Giorgio Morandi, Diego Velázquez, and Giotto, whom she encountered on a trip to Europe.

"Burning Man," the image of a man freeing himself from the red flames of a burning car, marked her 1968 departure from strong color and figurative representations. Inspired by the moon landing, she created drawings based on photographs of the surface of Earth's satellite: abstract and representational at once, without any recognizable composition or individual style. Artistically, Vija Celmins had thus arrived on the path she continues to pursue.

Each of her works invites us to look closely and even more closely. This applies to her cloud paintings or views of water surfaces, which evoke Gerhard Richter, as well as to images of the desert floor or the starry sky. Each depiction is a section of a vastness that extends beyond the boundaries of the picture – and the image of an image: a duplicate, a replica, a copy, so to speak.

With her object art, which is less a sculpture than a three-dimensional painting, Vija Celmins takes this irritation to the extreme. She recreates pebbles she has picked up, has them cast in bronze, and paints them faithfully based on the models, until it is no longer possible to distinguish between the original and the replica. She calls one such small-scale group of works, created between 1972 and 1982, "Capturing the Image in Memory." In the 1990s, she also moved to a close-up perspective with black-and-white images of spider webs or earthy-toned paintings of craquelure on ceramic surfaces.

Heinrich von Kleist famously said of Caspar David Friedrich's painting "The Monk by the Sea" that one looks at it "as if one's eyelids had been cut off." The same applies to Vija Celmin's paintings, which, however, do not depict landscapes of the soul and have long excluded human presence. Therefore, they radiate a great solitude and silence, even a nearness to death. Snow falls silently in white flakes against a black background in the artist's latest paintings. Constellations dissolve in a flurry of chance.

Finally, a small stroke of genius of the exhibition is the introduction to Vija Celmins herself, after encountering the work of an artist who maintains such a degree of distance in her work—even from world events. The two filmmakers, Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine, visited her in New York and the Hamptons, where she now lives and works, and captured a profound, thoroughly amusing portrait in 30 minutes. We see a woman who doesn't like to give insights, but who can be persuaded to answer questions, who works slowly and drives fast, who actually can't find any red in her paint cabinet, who scans the sky with an astronomy app, and who has ghosts of paintings on her wall.

Is it true that she wanted to create an image of an explosion? The artist smiles and reveals nothing. The only thing that is certain is that such an image would paradoxically evoke absolute calm, because in it, time would stand still. In this respect, Vija Celmins' early image of an isolated hand firing a pistol and her starry sky images, in which everything goes back to the Big Bang, are not as far apart as one might think.