Vija Celmins (1938)

Vija Celmins

Vija Celmins is a Latvian-American artist. She is best known for her photorealistic paintings and drawings of natural and man-made objects.

Celmins and her family fled Latvia during World War II and eventually settled in the United States. She studied art at the John Herron School of Art in Indianapolis and later at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Celmins began her career as a painter in the 1960s, and by the 1970s she had developed her signature style of photorealism. She is known for her painstaking attention to detail, and her paintings and drawings often take months or even years to complete. Some of her most famous works include images of the night sky, oceans, and rocks.

Celmins has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world, including a retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2006. Her work is held in the collections of many major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.