VIJA CELMINS at The Met Breuer 1/2 | Exhibition Archive 2020 #1

Exhibition Archive 2020 #1: 

VIJA CELMINS at Met Breuer
September 24, 2019 ~ January 12, 2020

My first blog for 2020 is the exhibition archive series.  I am glad that I did not miss this exhibition, since I really thought I would. Before staring the images though, I have to write down one thing, an unexpected news that the staff of the museum told me when we were having casual conversation at the entrance. Did you hear that Met Breuer, designed by the architect and furniture designer Marcel Breuer, is closing after the exhibition opening on March 2020? Meaning that Met Museum of Art is leaving the building. I still cannot believe this and it is too bad as it is a wonderful museum and artchitecture. Next exhibition after this is opening on March 4th, and it will go on until July5, 2020. I hope it is just rumor that it is closing...is it true that the builiding will be used as a storage for Frick Collection? So that means this article in 2018 is true. If that is the case, soon we might not be able to casually visit the beautiful building.

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Going back to the exhibition, On September 28, 2019 in the morning, I visited Met Breuer to see the first half of exhibition of Vija Celmins. It was one exhibition that excited me last year and I needed to visit as soon as it opened. That day I did not have enough time to finish the entier show so I only saw the first half and lest the museum. 

I was meaning to come back for the last half before ending of the show, then in mid December 2019 I had an accident that made me have fracture on tibia where it connected to the knee. 

Vija Celmins is one of many artists who I saw her work first, and then saw the artist much later. What artwork make me imagine how the real artist would look like or how she might sounds like is different from the real figure, always or for most of the time. 

Anyhow, this is my record of first half of the exhibition Vija Celmins. Last half of the exhibition (4th floor) is what mainly I wanted to see, but overall I really liked how the exhibition is organized into two floors with 5th floor for her early work of still life drawings and paintings of by observing objects to shifting to recreation of image of an image. Excellent written texts on wall along through out the show. 

Exhibition Overview

"This retrospective will provide a comprehensive view of Vija Celmins's career through a selection of approximately 120 works—from her earliest paintings made in Los Angeles in the 1960s to objects completed in New York in the last five years.

Throughout an accomplished career that spans more than fifty years, Celmins has sustained a practice of deep focus and extraordinary skill in a wide range of media. Celmins bases her exquisitely wrought paintings, sculpture, drawings, and prints on the world around us—sometimes through direct observation, but more often mediated by photography. Whether her sources are quotidian objects from her first studio in Venice, California, photographs of the Pacific Ocean taken at the local pier, or reproductions from newspapers, magazines, scientific exploration and inquiry, the resulting work possesses a magical verisimilitude." Met Museum 

I appreciated these enlarged sculptures of objects much more after seeing her work in her later life and also after reading texts and listening to about the practice.