Musée de l'Orangerie

Vija Celmins

Artist

b. 1938

Vija Celmins (born 1938 in Riga, Latvia) is an American artist. Her family fled Latvia during the Second World War and settled in Indianapolis in 1948; she studied at the John Herron School of Art and received her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. After early paintings of everyday objects and images of war, from the late 1960s she turned to painstakingly detailed drawings, paintings and prints of ocean surfaces, desert floors, night skies and spider webs, often based on photographs – images without horizon or fixed point of reference. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997, and a major retrospective, To Fix the Image in Memory, was shown at SFMOMA and the Met Breuer in 2018–19.