1. "Vija Celmins", Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, 2025, © Vija Celmins, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, Photo: Mark Niedermann
A slow gaze to infinity
At a time when images move quickly and attention is short, Vija Celmins offers something very different. Her art doesn’t ask to be understood right away or aim to stir strong emotions. Instead, it asks us to slow down and take time to really look at her work, though every details. With her careful methods and limited subjects, Celmins shows that repetition can have depth, and that beauty can come from looking closely, again and again to the same object, like a recurring motif.
The Fondation Beyeler’s 2025 exhibition stands as a landmark moment in the European reception of Celmins’s work. Although she is celebrated and widely collected in the United States, full-scale presentations of her oeuvre remain rare on this side of the Atlantic. The show brings together around ninety works, mostly paintings and drawings, with a selection of sculptures and prints, spanning six decades of her artistic production. Rather than constructing a linear narrative, the exhibition unfolds through recurring motifs, and visitors are invited not only to see but to spend time with each surface, to navigate the subtle shifts in tone, density, and perception that structure Celmins’s art.
Celmins’s visual language is minimal but never austere. From star fields to ocean waves, from lunar surfaces to spiderwebs, her chosen subjects hover on the threshold between the infinitely distant and the intimately close.
Between exile and observation, a biography
2. "Vija Celmins", Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, 2025, © Vija Celmins, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, Photo: Mark Niedermann
Born in Riga, Latvia in 1938, Vija Celmins experienced early displacement that would mark her life and work. As the Soviet army advanced in 1944, her family fled the country, eventually spending several years in German refugee camps before emigrating to the United States in 1948. They settled in Indianapolis, where she spent her youth before pursuing art studies at the John Herron School of Art and later at UCLA in Los Angeles.
This history of exile and forced migration does not manifest explicitly in her art, but it informs its tone, quiet, and deeply focused. As she once said, “I was always thinking that I was on the outside because I was so foreign.” This sense of distance, from culture, language, and place, can be felt in her consistent interest in phenomena that resist human scale or narrative clarity, oceans, deserts, the moon, the cosmos.
After settling in Los Angeles in the early 1960s, Celmins began painting with a style distinct from the Pop Art exuberance surrounding her. Influenced by Giorgio Morandi’s quiet still lifes and the gray tonalities of Velázquez, she developed a subdued palette and a methodical process. Early paintings from this time show domestic objects isolated against empty backgrounds, a lamp, a heater, a hotplate, rendered with a cool backdrop.
In the mid 1960s, she began incorporating media imagery, painting explosions, burning houses, and bomber planes based on war photographs. These works reflect both her personal memory of conflict and a growing skepticism about the representation of violence in the media. By 1968, she abandoned painting altogether in favor of drawing, turning to graphite and charcoal to pursue a visual language rooted in repetition, surface, and the incremental accumulation of marks.
Over the following decades, she worked in relative solitude, moving between New Mexico, New York, and Long Island. Her reputation grew steadily, though she produced slowly, around 220 works across her entire career. This scarcity is not a result of hesitation but of discipline. Each drawing can take months or years to complete. Celmins’s approach is neither conceptual nor intuitive, it is driven by a sustained material engagement with the image as surface and structure.
Surface, Space and Repetition
3. "Vija Celmins", Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, 2025, © Vija Celmins, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, Photo: Mark Niedermann
The Fondation Beyeler exhibition presents an expansive yet tightly focused portrait of Celmins’s oeuvre. The show begins with her earliest paintings from the mid 1960s, frontal images of mundane studio objects that quietly challenge the conventions of still life. “Lamp #1” (1964), “Heater” (1964), and “Hot Plate” (1964) embody a foundational decision that would shape her entire career, to remove emotion, expression, and authorship from the image and instead emphasize the act of sustained looking. These are not sentimental or symbolic images, but records of attention.
Next come the war paintings and media derived works where violence is rendered in such a muted tone that it feels disturbingly inert. These images are stilled, even neutralized, by the uniform application of paint and their silence becomes a form of resistance.
From the 1970s onward, drawing dominates, charcoal and graphite become her primary mediums, and her subjects shift to elemental natural surfaces, the sea, the sky, the moon, the desert. In “Untitled (Ocean)” (1969) or “Untitled (Desert – Galaxy)” (1974), she constructs images from photographs, but the result is not mimetic. Her process involves layering graphite to create an illusion of depth while preserving the flatness of the paper. These drawings have no focal point, they are immersive and disorienting, resisting any quick reading.
Celmins’s works are not concerned with composition or narrative. Instead, they are driven by texture, scale, and density. In the star fields, every tiny dot of light is individually rendered, in the desert floors, every stone is redrawn. The viewer is not offered an image but an encounter with the image as labor.
Printmaking also plays a role, particularly mezzotint, aquatint, and photogravure. These techniques, with their rich tonalities and capacity for minute detail, align with her sensibility. The prints are not reproductions but variations and each version reactivates the source in a new material language.
Sculpture, though rare in her practice, occupies a crucial place in the exhibition. The centerpiece is “To Fix the Image in Memory I–XI” (1977, 1982), which juxtaposes found stones with their nearly indistinguishable painted bronze replicas. This act of doubling turns perception itself into a puzzle. They function as material counterparts to her drawings, objects that test the boundaries between surface and meaning.
The final room of the exhibition is devoted to her most recent series, paintings of snowfall illuminated against a night sky. These are her largest works to date and mark a return to painting after decades dominated by drawing. In “Snowfall (blue)” (2022, 2024), thousands of hand painted flakes create a field of suspended movement. These works evoke both the cosmic and the tactile, the infinite and the ephemeral. They return to a motif she first touched in 1968, now rendered with a lifetime’s mastery.
As a concluding gesture, the Fondation Beyeler commissioned a film by Louise Lemoine and Ila Bêka. Developed in close dialogue with the artist, the film offers a portrait not of biography, but of process. It shows Celmins at work in her studio, revealing the gestures, tools, and rituals behind her exacting practice. Rather than explaining the art, it extends the exhibition’s invitation, to slow down, to look closely, to remain.
Conclusion
Vija Celmins is not an artist of spectacle or grand themes. Her work resists summary, each image, each surface, is a proposition about time, perception, and the act of seeing. At the Fondation Beyeler, her art is presented not as a career retrospective in the traditional sense, but as a sustained encounter with one of the most disciplined and formally coherent practices in contemporary art. In her drawings of galaxies and oceans, in her cast stones and snowfall paintings, Celmins constructs a universe defined not by narrative, but by care. Her art does not tell us what to feel or what to think. It asks only that we look, carefully, slowly, again.
Informations about the exhibition
Place: Fondation Beyeler
Date: 15.6.2025 - 21.9.2025
Curators: Theodora Vischer and James Lingwood
Ticket: Available online OR at the front desk of the museum
Informations about the Fondation Beyeler
Baselstrasse 101
CH-4125 Riehen/Basel
Phone: +41 61 645 97 00
Fax: +41 61 645 97 19
Mail: info@fondationbeyeler.ch