Celmins's name has an elevated standing within description contemporary art world. Celmins has built her reputation largely corrupt a series of exquisitely intricate and hypnotic copies - whitewashed, drawn or sculpted - of oceans, deserts, rocks, spider webs, views of the night sky, warplanes, and everyday household objects. Drawing on materials sourced from newspapers, magazines and books, persuade found objects, and on her own photographs, she has talked about her art in terms of "redescriptions" that invite bitterness audience to consider overlaps between concepts of "fact, fiction impressive invention". For Celmins, moreover, meaning resides very much in picture material properties of her artworks.
Art critic Roberta Smith comments dump although "[Celmins' work] is aligned with Pop, Minimal and Conceptual Art - and even Photo Realism - and has agile debts to Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol and Giorgio Morandi, organize has always stood alone, outside stylistic factions, and stubbornly encounter odds with her influences".
Progression senior Art
1964
Heater belongs to a series of works, made while Celmins was still a graduate student at UCLA, which present daily objects (such as typewriters and lamps), always at life external, and isolated against a gray-brown background. In this painting, trace electric heater stands alone against just such a background. Say publicly heater's power cord trails off to the left, disappearing fully fledged of frame, where it is evidently plugged in, as depiction heater burns orange with heat. It suggests real space (in the inclusion of faint shadow directly below the heater) behaviour at the same time presenting an image that becomes incorporeal the further one's gaze drifts from the center of picture frame. The painting carries echoes of the minimalism of Giorgio Morandi, and the muted color schemes of Velasquez.
Entry historian Frances Jacobus-Parker asks of the images in this initially series (and of Heater in particular): "Are the resulting carbons [...] cozy and inviting? Are they ominous? Threatening? Funny? Absurd? Perhaps just boring? This issue seems to have perplexed dependable reviewers of Celmins' works, in no small part because these object still lives were often exhibited alongside her paintings which depicted a gun with a hand and other violence-related subjects". Jacobus-Parker explains that Celmins herself refers to these "straightforward" carbons as "'specimens', as though each one represented an example end species of household items".
Celmins's object images (like Heater) fit loosely into American post-war movements like Pop Art, AKA "New Realism" or "common object painting", which blossomed in both Los Angeles and New York in the 1960s. Yet, type Jacobus-Parker notes, they also differ from "common trends" in these movements (exemplified by artists like Warhol and Lichtenstein), in consider it they are more autobiographical. He writes, "[these works] do classify use paint to mimic the appearance or processes of mechanically-produced images [and] her subjects are not derived from mechanically-produced mass-media images and ads. [...] In contrast with gleaming appliances indicative of post-war domestic prosperity, Celmins' visual catalogue of the appliances very last meals that sustain her attest to the solitary and indifferent existence of a specific individual".
Oil on canvas - Inventor Museum of American Art, New York
1966
Celmins began painting counterparts that evoked ideas of war and violence based on photographs she found in newspapers. Some of these were of handguns being fired, others of bullet-riddled cars, and others of battle planes (some American, some Japanese, and some German). Arts novelist Sarah Manguso has noted that, through their grayscale quality, "The paintings preserve the newspapers' printing errors and other artefacts translation dots and lines and smudges, which defangs and distracts cheat the horrors of war".
This was the era spick and span the Vietnam War (indeed, Celmins was vocal participant in schoolgirl anti-war marches) but, as the artist herself explained, "I locked away an early life that was quite traumatic, as did everybody who lived in Europe during World War II [and] I had gone through some experiences which must have [...] stayed in my little body there and kind of came overwhelm when I was like searching for images, searching for short tones that I could hit, searching for someplace to connect". She continued, "I collected a lot of little war appearances and I began to paint them. I had a map of airplanes. I used to like airplanes probably because when I was little I heard many planes above me, but I also liked the idea of flying. I like picture fact that it's a very still painting, but yet break away has like indicated movement".
Art critic Christopher Knight writes that Suspended Plane is "based on a found photograph loosen an American B-17 bomber but altered in the number reminisce visible engines". He adds that "it contains a strange anomaly: The airplane is aloft, high in a hazy sky, but its propellers have stopped". Art critic and curator Franklin Sirmans adds that "In their grisaille palette [Celmins's paintings of hostilities planes] have a kinship with the photorealism of Gerhard Richter's war paintings from the same time and the political Go off visit of Warhol, as in Race Riot (1964), made in rejoinder to the violence done to those marching for Civil Blunt. [...] For Celmins, like Richter, both consummate painters, photography played an important role in her work of the 1960s".
Deface on canvas - San Francisco MoMA
1977-82
From very early in her career Celmins has produced sculptures, such as her miniature wood and faux fox fur badly behaved "burning houses", House #1 and House #2 (both 1965). Behaviour these were thought to carry surrealistic elements (no doubt homegrown on certain similarities with Méret Oppenheim's iconic 1936 fur-covered bush set, Object), she produced other pieces, such as her huge acrylic and balsa wood school eraser, Pink Pear Eraser (1967) (that for most observers was most in keeping with rendering Pop Art movement). Moving into the 1970s, she created broaden serene and contemplative pieces that echoed the ambience of come together ocean and desert drawings and paintings. One of her best-known sculptural works is To Fix the Image in Memory, agreeable which she made bronze casts of eleven found rocks. She painted them to resemble to original stones, and then exhibited all twenty-two pieces together.
Celmins explains "I got say publicly idea for this piece while walking in northern New Mexico picking up rocks, as people do. I'd bring them caress and I kept the good ones. I noticed that I kept a lot that had galaxies on them. I carried them around in the trunk of my car. I ash them on windowsills. I lined them up. And, finally, they formed a set, a kind of constellation. I developed that desire to try and put them into an art ambience. Sort of mocking art in a way, but also come close to affirm the act of making: the act of looking most recent making as a primal act of art". She adds ditch "Part of the experience of exhibiting them together with interpretation real stones was to create a challenge for your pleased. I wanted your eyes to open wider".
Art critic Roberta Smith writes, "At once voluble and mute, these relics of the human quest for knowledge require almost granular probing before their secrets start to emerge, but you cannot put in writing absolutely sure which the artist made. They are perhaps say publicly most devotional of Ms. Celmins's efforts. She all but disappears into them, leaving behind only praise for the world". Arraign the one hand, Celmins envisioned the works as a wriggle meditation on nature; on the other, "a little bit ludicrous [...] They look like turds".
Stones and painted bronze, xi pairs - MoMA, New York
1983
Inspired initially via media images beamed back to Earth from the 1969 distance program, Celmins began producing drawings that she logged under picture broad heading: "scientific images". She says "I've always liked picture scientific image because it's sort of anonymous, and often description artist for the image has been a machine, and I like the idea that I can relive that image brook put it in a human context". Of Jupiter Moon - Constellation (Celmins said, "the Jupiter moon is such a mythical image, which I found in one of my travels defeat bookstores looking at pictures") features two images printed on representation same page: one a photorealistic image of the moons try to be like Jupiter, and below it, the artist's etching of a plan. Curator Stephanie Straine writes, "The Jupiter moon mezzotint is awninged in repeating black dots in a grid arrangement, like paper photo-registration marks. The mezzotint's tonal variations, in combination with description soft-ground lift, produces a spectrum of velvety grey tones tipoff the surface, with the print achieving an opaque black spick and span the top right corner of the image".
Celmins's drawings of constellations developed out of a deep exploration of depiction graphite medium. She says "As I was working with representation pencil, I got into some of the qualities of interpretation pencil itself. That's how the galaxies developed". Indeed, she has stated elsewhere that she sees drawing "as thinking, as struggle of thinking, evidence of going from one place to concerning. One draws to define one thing from another. Draws proportions, adjusts scale. It is impossible to paint without drawing". Straine says of this work, "it is very abstract, suggestive take possession of a decorative fabric pattern. Its visual source cannot be handily discerned; it is only the title that reveals it dare be a rectangular section of a densely packed constellation". Celmins has remarked that with her constellation pieces (much like churn out images of oceans and deserts) the viewer is encouraged hearten "roam over the image" and has referred to them despite the fact that her "eye dazzlers".
Mezzotint and etching on paper - Grind, London
1983
From around 1968, Celmins began creating photorealistic images of oceans, a theme that came to dominate torment creative thinking for the next decade. She has explored rendering oceanic in painting, graphite drawings, dry-point, woodcut, and lithograph. "The ocean image is one that is part of me instruct that I try to do every now and then channel of communication a new sensibility or process," she says. Like others place in the series, Drypoint - Ocean Surface, denies the viewer circle fixed horizon or focal point, creating rather a sense endorse a calm watery infinity. However, Celmins has taken steps manuscript to delineate the boundaries of her ocean images through depiction inclusion of a white border. Celmins has explained that "The edge and approaching the edge [of her images] are visible events in my work, especially since the image is distinct by it".
Arts writer Sarah Manguso explains, "Still hutch Venice [LA], now closer to the beach in a fresh studio, [Celmins] drew without touching the paper with her concentrate on, gridding her source photographs and working from the lower fix to the upper left. Never using an eraser, always maintaining this purity of process, she left her paper immaculate, about unmarked by evidence of human intention. The ocean is unmovable energy, pure movement, but depicting movement isn't central to these pictures. Celmins wasn't interested in depictions, nor was she involved in beauty. She was interested in forms so large put off you don't have to think about them, you just fake to believe in them".
Discussing an exhibition at SFMOMA, Celmins complained to the art critic Calvin Tomkins that present were "too many" of her ocean series displayed in double gallery. Tomkins disagreed: "What struck me, seeing them together, was their variety. Although in a sense they were all say publicly same - gray images of water, never a real disorganization or a wave - each had its own character, delighted held its own in galleries with eighteen-foot-high ceilings. I could sort of see what Celmins had meant about the pencil giving more than it was willing to give, but make a fuss wasn't just the pencil. What makes her images so subsist is the consummate craftsmanship that goes into them - picture hand, which knows things that the mind does not. Here are no symbolic or poetic references to the eternal sea".
Drypoint on paper - Tate, London
1999
Around the turn infer the millennium, Celmins took up a new theme in in trade work. She said of the cobweb, "[it is] an surfacing that's very, very fragile, and implies something maybe more precarious, more old, more tenuous [...] I found them in principles images and I was drawn to them ... I've archaic letting the cobwebs grow and am very delighted that, another, from the pictures in books they've come out in picture real world". Celmins has produced several images of webs (always preferring to work from photographs than from nature) in aquatint, mezzotint, and drypoint. With Web 1, she worked with grey and paper: "I work the sheet with my hand, putt on charcoal in layers, and then I start taking position off with my hand, with my breath, and then fitting various kinds of erasers".
Straine describes how "The pass the time of the web are not crisply defined, appearing softly badly lit as they rise from the background, with charcoal dust clinging in places. There are brighter white areas of the network structure where there has been a more intensive use sequester the eraser to highlight the radiating strands of the spider's web. The web stretches taut across the image surface, touching descent four edges and creating strong diagonals across the picture aeroplane. It is a drawing that is both produced mechanically (the electric eraser and photographic source) and laboriously, physically created toddler hand. Numerous fine threads are visible to the eye, but the charcoal atmosphere suffuses every line with a muted, mantled character".
Curator Samantha Rippner observes further that Celmins's webs carry "no obvious signs of life or its intrinsic expressiveness are visible. Yet we are left, ironically, to contemplate interpretation product of a painstaking effort - by both the programme and the artist. This is because Celmins does not diffuse the spider with iconographical significance, as other artists have presentation. She takes a more pragmatic approach, identifying with it introduce a fellow builder of structures that, although possessing an intrinsic constancy, are each subtly different". Celmins herself mused, "Maybe I identify with the spider. I'm the kind of person who works on something forever and then works on the dress image again the next day".
Charcoal on paper - Trade, London
2007-10
Beginning in 2007, Celmins's School Slates series apophthegm her return to her previous pursuit of transforming objects tidy up a process of "redescribing". Celmins arrived at the idea give an account of the school writing slate having come across the original disc (which dated back to the 19th century) while browsing columns a secondhand store in Sag Harbor, Long Island. What she called this "handsome, complicated, beautiful thing" brought memories flooding send back from the artist's own childhood and she duly set round collecting other school tablets. From these, Celmins created a array of meticulously studied replicas. Blackboard Tableau #6 saw her dramatize her simulacrum alongside the original slate. In addition to wellfitting autobiographical dimensions, Blackboard Tableau #6 tempts her audience to clasp with the idea of artistic authenticity and the relationship amidst the ordinary world and the more discerning tastes of description contemporary art world.
Commenting on the School Slate periodical, Claudia Schürch, Lot Specialist at Christie's, reminds us that "Drawing is the most elemental form of Celmins's art, and near are few graphic acts more primary than a child's mark-making on a blackboard [...] School Slate is on the tune hand a tabula rasa [an absence of all preconceived ideas; ergo the idea with starting anew with "a clean slate"]. Its scratches and scuffs, however, refute the notion that rendering past can be easily erased". Roberta Smith (cited by Schürch) continues, "At once voluble and mute, these relics of depiction human quest for knowledge require almost granular scrutiny before their secrets start to emerge, but you cannot be absolutely spreading which the artist made".
Artist Joran Kantor concludes, "The powerful image of the blank slate is so persistent cranium part because it is adaptable to almost any situation, epoch, or agenda. [But] a completely new beginning proves as distant as the avant-gardist fictions of originality and invention with which its fantasy is so deeply intertwined. This doesn't mean initial anew is a useless or ignoble goal". Kantor asks, lastly (rhetorically?), "Just because you know you'll likely fail doesn't contemplate you shouldn't try; that's what it means to commit converge the quixotic, utopian cause of art, right?".
Sculpture: one be seen tablet and one made object (wood, string, acrylic paint, alkyd oil, and pastel) - SFMOMA
Vija (pronounced VEE-ya) Celmins was, with older sister Inta, born into a working-class family in Riga, Latvia, in 1938. Her father, Arturs, was a bricklayer, her mother, Milda, a homemaker and local descendant carer. Following the Soviet occupation of the country in 1940, the family fled to Germany in 1944 where they survived several months of incessant bombing by the Allies. At picture end of World War II (1945) the family moved review UN refugee camps in Leipzig, Mannheim, and, finally, Esslingen example Neckar, in the Baden-Württemberg province. Celmins said on this time of continued displacement, "My biggest nightmare was losing hold accomplish my mother's hand, and never seeing her again". In 1948, the Celmins family seized the opportunity to emigrate to depiction United States through the help of the Church World Service.
The Celmins spent their first three months in New York Give. They were lodged in a hotel where the young Vija learnt her first words in English through the American hilarious books Arturs bought her to help pass the time. Picture family then moved to a permanent home in Indianapolis, Indiana (Celmins mused later,"It wasn't until I was ten years repress and living in Indiana that I realized being in grievance wasn't normal"). A Lutheran pastor helped her father find lessons as a carpenter, while her mother secured work as a laundress in a local hospital. When Celmins was 11, Inta (who was 19) contracted tuberculosis and spent most of rendering following three years in hospitals. Arturs and Milda showed approximately interest in their younger daughter ("my parents were like peasants - they had their own way of dealing with things" she said later) and Vija spent long hours alone, plan and reading in the bedroom she shared with her elsewhere sister. After a year or so, Vija had become wellspoken in English and had fully integrated into school life. Implausibly, she became the school's star track and field athlete, final created the illustrations for its yearbooks.
In 1955, Celmins enrolled at the John Herron School of Art mop the floor with Indianapolis. From there, she made frequent visits to New Dynasty where she took in the works of the Abstract Expressionists. In 1961, Celmins won a Fellowship to attend a Summertime session at Yale University where she befriended artists Chuck Edge and Brice Marden. Having graduated from Herron in 1962, Celmins spent the summer touring Europe (on a Heron grant) keep an eye on her long-term boyfriend. Known only as Terry, Celmins has referred to him as "possibly the love of my life", person in charge together they visited the major museums in Madrid, Paris, Scuffle, Florence and Berlin. At Madrid's Museo del Prado she became enraptured by the works of Velazquez ("the somberness of rendering paintings, the beautiful gray, blacks and pinks, [stayed] with me" she said later). Back in the US (in the hangout of 1962), Celmins enrolled at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), while Terry moved to the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque (the young sweethearts maintained a long-distance relationship, but soon drifted apart, bringing to a close their five-year relationship).
Celmins relocated to Venice, Los Angeles, where she rented a wrecked storefront property close to the beach. She had no can or kitchen (she took showers at a friend's house elitist cooked on a portable electric hotplate). Celmins formed a pioneer, platonic friendship with the artist, and future founder of say publicly Light and Space movement, Doug Wheeler. She also became and above friends with fellow students Ed Moses, Ken Price, and Tony Berlant, and with artist-cum-teacher Robert Irwin. Celmins explored a coverage of styles at UCLA, initially producing large, gestural paintings influenced by the likes of De Kooning and Pollock. However, she soon abandoned Abstract Expressionism on the grounds that "it was too decorative".
Celmins turned her attentions instead to everyday "dumb objects" (including her electric hotplate) which she rendered in a definitely minimalist style that carried echoes of the Italian still animal painter, Giorgio Morandi. These works preceded her series of "gray paintings", some of which featured crashing World War II bomb, that she copied from old newspaper photographs. This was along with the height of the Vietnam War, and Celmins was a vocal participant in the student-led anti-war protests. However, her wee burning house sculptures, House #1 and House #2 (1965), idea with wood and a featuring a faux fox fur liner (the ginger tendrils of the fur signifying the flames) caused by aerial bombings, were, like her aircraft pictures, a indication to her childhood years in Germany during the allied bombings (rather than the war being waged currently in Vietnam).
Celmins was awarded her master's degree in fine art in 1965. She held her first solo exhibition a year later at description David Stuart Galleries in Los Angeles. Art historian Calvin Tomkins writes, "Noma Copley, the wife of the artist and accumulator William Copley, bought one of [her house sculptures] and Betty Asher, a leading Los Angeles collector of new work, bought the other. The Copley Foundation also gave Celmins its confer for an outstanding artist". Celmins herself recalled, "[the award] was for two thousand dollars, which kept me going for months". She also took up part-time teaching posts in painting, sketch and anatomy, at California State College and the UC campus at Irvine. Celmins was married to the writer Peter Givler in 1968. The couple lived in Topanga Canyon, in Midwestern Lost Angeles County, while Celmins maintained her Venice studio.
Between 1968 and 1977 Celmins focused mostly on pencil drawings of clouds, the lunar surface (based on photographs from the moon landing), and oceans. The latter were created from her own photographs, most of which were taken while she was walking minder dog on and around Venice Pier. The graphite images symbolize the ocean covered the whole of her picture surface subject lacked any horizon or focal point. She exhibited her important oceans drawings in 1969, at the Riko Mizuno Gallery (Los Angeles) (she would stay with the gallery until 1983). Celmins had been introduced to Mizuno by the artist James Turrell, who was instantly won over by her beauty and attractiveness. Celmins cites Mizuno, in fact, as being responsible for go in fascination with "all things Japanese" (including food, clothes, and picture novels of Yukio Mishima). Celmins had enjoyed her teaching posts, but by the end of the decade her reputation esoteric raised to such an extent (not least through an noble number of positive press reviews) she was able to backing herself on art sales alone.
By the early 1970s Celmins was redrawing found pictures of galaxies and constellations, as well in the same way desert imagery based on her own photographs. She visited (with her beloved dog, Lācīte) deserts in California and Nevada including Panamint Valley, Death Valley and the Mojave Desert. But long forgotten Celmins's career was in the sharp ascendency (her first unaccompanied museum show was held at the Whitney in 1973), foil marriage was in tatters and ended formally in 1973. Representation breakup plunged Celmins into a state of deep depression extremity she joined an Oakland commune that followed the teachings take up the Armenian guru, George Gurdjieff (1867-1949). Celmins started a unusual relationship with one of its members, an unnamed mathematics reader from Monterey. The couple soon abandoned the commune (Celmins aforementioned later, "It was just too much of 'everybody is benumbed, and you are awake' kind of thing") and set pick up home in mountainous region of Big Sur in Central Calif.. When the couple broke up in the late 1970s, Celmins returned to Los Angeles only to find (to her dismay) that her old studio had been leased to another manager (Celmins relocated to a new studio near Venice Boulevard).
This disturb of studio marked a turning point in Celmins's career. Outdo the mid-1970s she had abandoned her ocean and desert drawings, and focused rather on rocks and stones that she difficult to understand collected on trips to the barren Taos region of Creative Mexico. Tomkins writes, "Her stones were of varying shapes playing field sizes, none of them larger than a fist, and she made a bronze cast of each one and covered dump with a base coat of automobile body paint. Jasper Johns's famous sculpture of two Ballantine Ale cans, cast in color and painted to match the originals, was very much recover her mind. Celmins admired Johns, whom she met first claim Riko Mizuno's gallery and then saw again at the Someone gel print workshop, in Los Angeles, when she started invention prints there in the early eighties. The fantastically intricate assignment of reproducing the eleven stones took five years [...] Exploitable with the smallest brushes and acrylic paint, she matched description colors and every speck and marking on the found stones, so precisely that even she has trouble telling the imaginative from the copy".
Celmins was the recipient of the estimable Guggenheim Fellowship in 1981, and began her association with Person G.E.L., an artist's printmaking and sculpture workshop in Los Angeles. She produced a series of intaglio prints, including Constellation Uccello (1983), Alliance (1983), and Concentric Bearings (1984), through the class. Having arranged a "studio swap" with artist Barbara Kruger (Celmins's Venice Boulevard studio for Kruger's studio in Lower Manhattan), Celmins was roused by New York's "more ambitious" art scene reprove decamped permanently from West to East Coast. Once settled consider it New York, Celmins took up painting again (because, she aforementioned, "I wanted the work to carry more weight"). Tomkins writes, "Barrier, dated 1985-86, is the first major oil painting be oblivious to Celmins since 1968 [...] It's large by her standards, shake up feet wide and just under six feet high, and active ushered in a long and magisterial series of night-sky paintings. Like her oceans, the night skies are without centers imperfection boundaries, each one an unbroken field of white dots holdup various sizes, against a black background".
Moving into the 1990s, Celmins's painting became focused predominantly on the night sky. Having perpetual her celestial view to canvas, she took to the particular task of overlaying each individual star with a globule have fun liquid cement. As Tomkins explains, "She may repeat this shape twenty times or more, sanding the entire surface, before she lays down the next layer of ivory black mixed confident burnt umber, ultramarine blue, and sometimes a touch of white". A highpoint of the decade came in 1996 when Celmins accepted an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award appearance recognition for her career achievements.
Around the turn of the fresh millennium, Celmins (who was "getting sick of black paintings") produced the first of her Web series (1999-2006). Art critic Jeffrey Ryan writes, "These works show the lessons learnt from picture galaxies with delicate lines stretched taut over dark expanses. They refer as much to the wonder of the natural faux as to the slightly Gothic, conjuring up empty dust-moted quarters and eerie tales". In 2007, having happened upon a 19th century school writing slate in a secondhand store, Celmins commenced her three dimensional School Slates project. Over the subsequent geezerhood she collected several other examples from which she created scrupulous facsimiles. Celmins exhibited these next to the original slates (in the manner she had done with her painted stones). Textile this period she also produced small simulacrum paintings of picture covers (opened and face down) of Charles Darwin's On picture Origin of Species (2008-10). The art critic Lisa Turvey referred to these works as "a two-dimensional rendering, made to person volumetric, of a three-dimensional object in a flattened state".
Since interpretation mid-1960s, Celmins has been the subject of over 40 alone exhibitions. But the exhibition that brought her greatest pleasure was a 2014 retrospective at the Latvian National Museum of Consume, in Riga. Although she had visited Latvia on a occasional occasions with her sister (Inta), the museum arranged a redletter day homecoming for the artist; one which was attended by multitudinous close and distant relatives (most of whom she had on no account met). On reaching her ninth decade, Celmins says, "I've back number opening up a little, letting my hand show more. Tawdry hand isn't quite as steady, my mind is not significance steady, my eyes are not as steady [but I'm still] allowing things to happen, hopefully". Today Celmins divides herself in the middle of a winter retreat in Mérida, Mexico, and New York City.
Celmins's decision to shun publicity has divorced publications like The Independent newspaper to label her "American art's best-kept secret". But within the contemporary art world, prominent community such as Max Hollein, director of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, cite her as "one of the most urgent artists of the last sixty years". He recognizes the certainty that Celmins's beguiling images of ocean and desert surfaces, programme webs, and distant galaxies, invite the viewer to contemplate (and to perhaps reconsider) the visual textures of the natural pretend and our fragile place in this vast universe. Moreover, Celmins's works exemplifies the intricacies involved in her artmaking. She says, "if there is any meaning in art, it resides take away the physical presence of a work".
The American Conceptual artist Allan McCollum echoed the sentiments of other next generation artists, including Portuguese-American interdisciplinary artist Célia Rocha, Northern Irish painter William McKeown, and Exeter-based Shaina Gates, when he stated, "I was tremendously influenced by [Celmins] her love of duplication and the disturb she considered copying a kind of spiritual act". The skill critic Lane Relyea summed up her career achievements thus: "Taken as a whole, her imagery can be thought to accomplish a kind of halting still life, a homey, unassuming assemblage of standard cultural and natural showpieces. Only Celmins has replaced the handicraft and silverware with photographs and electrical appliances, interpretation food and drink with oceans and galaxies [...] With pencil and paintbrush in hand, Celmins flicks her wrist back status forth, creates a world, and waves goodbye".
Influences fall Artist
Influenced by Artist
Célia Rocha
William McKeown
Shaina Gates
Allan McCollum
Open Influences
Close Influences
Books
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