Vija Celmiņa. Double Reality
From April 12 to June 22, 2014, the Great Exhibition Hall of the Art Museum “Rīgas Birža” (Doma Square 6, Old Riga) hosts a solo exhibition by the internationally renowned Latvian-American artist Vija Celmiņa, titled Double Reality. The exhibition is part of the Riga – European Capital of Culture 2014 program within the Force Majeure thematic section Ocean’s Longing, which aligns with Vija Celmiņa’s drawings of the ocean’s rippling water surface.
The exhibition spans fifty years of the artist’s creative work, from 1964 to 2014. The Latvian National Museum of Art is pleased to have curated a diverse exhibition, bringing to Riga various media used by the artist, showcasing artistic directions that have evolved over these fifty years, highlighting different periods in Celmiņa’s art, and presenting themes that have captivated the artist. The exhibition features Vija Celmiņa’s paintings, sculptures, objects, graphite and charcoal drawings, as well as printmaking works in mezzotint, aquatint, drypoint, etching, and woodcut techniques. In total, 53 of the artist’s works are on display, sourced from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt am Main, the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris, the National Galleries of Scotland, Tate in London, the collection of the U.S. Embassy in Latvia, the Mūkusalas Art Salon collection, the Latvian National Museum of Art collection, the McKee Gallery in New York, and Vija Celmiņa’s personal collection.
The exhibition prominently features works depicting the artist’s famous ocean and starry sky scenes. For the Latvian exhibition catalog, Liāna Langa has translated American essayist Eliot Weinberger’s poem Stars, which was published in 2005 by the Museum of Modern Art in New York alongside reproductions of Vija Celmiņa’s works. The English poem was originally published with parallel translations in Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, and Māori, and can now also be read in Latvian.
A film about Vija Celmiņa, created by the Juris Podnieks Studio, will be shown at the exhibition.
Vija Celmiņa was born in Riga in 1938. In 1944, she fled with her family as a refugee, immigrated to the United States in 1948, and settled in Indianapolis in 1949. In 1962, she began her studies at the University of California (earning a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1965) and moved to Los Angeles, where she lived and worked until 1981, when she relocated to New York.
Text: Elita Ansone
