Vija Celmins

Vija Celmins has spent decades fixing the unfixable: ocean waves, night skies, desert stone fields. The work is painstaking — graphite, oil, printmaking — and the subject is always something too vast or transient to hold in the mind's eye. What remains is the physical fact of the drawing itself.

She began in Los Angeles in the 1960s, painting studio objects before turning to found photographs of natural phenomena. By the end of that decade she'd set aside paint for graphite and developed the all-over compositions — stars, rocks, water — that became her signature. She returned to painting in the 1980s, but drawing and printmaking remain central.

Born in Riga, she studied at Yale and UCLA, lived in Los Angeles until 1981, then moved to New York. Her work has been shown at the Met, Centre Pompidou, Menil Collection, and Fondation Beyeler. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997.