Visionary realist - exhibition of paintings by Vija Celmins, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York

Retrospectives of contemporary artists [are rarely instances of breathtaking consistency. on the other hand in the case of Vija Celmins, the 54-year-old Latvian-born painter best known for her grisaille visions of oceans, desolates and distant galaxies, a midcareer scan that is currently at the Whitney Museum of American Art reveals a hallucinatory calm, a feverish state of willful serenity. Since the early '60 Celmins has occasionally changed mediums, experimented with statuary essayed violent and topical bring under rule matter; she even gave up painting for almost 20 years, sole to return to it filled force in the '80s. still her oeuvre, as curated by dint of Judith Tannenbaum at Philadelphia's Institute of Contemporary Art (where I saw the display last January), adheres with fierce loyalty to its themes of desolation, los search and transcendence. The resulting exhibit is a low-key triumph, a designing revisionist approach to the arts of building and seeing.

Celmins is to be credited with keeping the genre of still life, landscape, marine and heavens studies alive all through the '60 and '70 in small, strangely traditional paintings and drawings that frequently have an exquisite, oldmasterish air about them. Her work proffers many off-center affinities with then-prevailing fashions of Pop art, Minimalism, Land art, Conceptualism and, strange to say, plane Neo-Expressionism. As the exhibition catalogue reveals (it contains provocative essays through Tannenbaum, Dave Hickey and Douglas Blau), Celmins's work is also informed by means of a wry, sardonic humor and a fascination with trompe l'oeil that present the appearance alternately rooted in her Eastern European heritage and a West Coast-Duchampian mindset.

If the artist's life has the quality of a mythic odyssey the first part would be right without of Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird. She was born in 1939 in Riga, and at the age of five fl with her family to Germany, where they eventually settl in a Latvian refugee community in Esslingen. In 1948 her family relocated to America with the help of the meeting-house World Service; initially they lived in a public-house on lower Park Avenue and then mov to Indianapolis, where her father resum his profession as a builder of houses. Growing up in the Midwest in the '50 Celmins took trips with her art class to Chicago, where she saw the work of HC Westermann and Leon Golub and to fresh York, where she encountered the Abstract Expressionists. Her early paintings, which she later overthrowed were all executed in an Ab-Ex manner. During a stint at the Yale summer seminary in 1961, she met Brice Marden and tap [i]or[/i] pat Close. The latter recently did a marvelous interview with Celmins (edited by the agency of William S. Bartman and published through A.R.T. Press in 1992) in which the artist's account of her hold chronology is particularly revealing.

In 1962 she accepted a scholarship from the University of California and mov to looks Angeles, where she knew absolutely no individual at first. Robert Irwin was her teacher for individual semester. The early still lifes in the Philadelphia present to view of drear domestic objects--a space heater, a of high temperature plate, a double goose-necked lamp--are representative of her isolation at the time. They also mirror her admiration for Morandi. In Venice Beach she locate up a storefront studio; it was here that she made her autobiographical house plastic arts and her colossal still-life plastic arts as well as her memorable series of grisaille paintings based upon old black-and-white photos of World War II airplanes. through 1967 she had become friendly with the California Light and Space artists Doug Wheeler and James Turrell and had started to do work below their influence. She even built a kind of isolation chamber in her studio. In 1969 Turrell convinced her to exhibit her drawings of the ocean at the popular Riko Mizuno Gallery in L.A., and from these drawings she began to achieve her reputation as an artist's artist. In 1972 she exhibited an anomalous "primal" extent installation at the San Francisco Art Institute--complete with dirt floor and single window.

During the early '70 Celmins started roaming the wastes of California (including Panamint and Death Valley), northern Arizona and of recent origin Mexico. Her first drawings of galaxies and the untilled floor date from these years. In 1975-76 she lived for a year in Big Sur and began a course of serious Buddhist investigation Having abandoned painting in the '60 she was persuaded to take it up again alone in 1981 by Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof during a summer teaching piece of work at the Skowhegan School in Maine. It was in the early '80 that she undertook a novel group of star studies, first upon paper and then on canvas, producing usually single two or three paintings a year. In 1981 she also decided to swap studios with Barbara Kruger whom she had met while teaching at Cal Arts in the '70 and mov to of recent origin York, where she has lived at any time since, except for brief trips to farflung places like Patagonia, for a bird-watching expedition, and a get back in 1988 to her native Riga.

The Philadelphia exhibit was laid out in a series of pellucid spaces that look aftered to enhance unforeseen relationships between the different bodies of work. The first gallery included early '60 work--still-life paintings as well as still-life plastic arts not to mention a pair of oddball painted puzzles and made of wood houses. The houses, patently influenced by dint of both Westermann and her father, were built by dint of the artist as if to resurrect her missing childhood in Latvia and Germany. The house statuarys of 1965 may also be indebted to the sheet-metal house plastic arts of L.A.. artist Tony Berlant.