“Vija Celmins: A Drawings Retrospective”
Hammer Museum
Jan. 28-April 22
Nicholas Copernicus’ worst enemy might be Vija Celmins. If in trying to fathom the world, Copernicus revealed it was actually round, Celmins tells us the universe is flat.
In “Vija Celmins: A Drawings Retrospective,” a traveling exhibit running at the UCLA Hammer Museum until April 22 and organized by curator Jonas Sola of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, viewers take a chronological survey of the artist’s graphite and charcoal works, which include seascapes, desert landscapes and sweeping surveys of the night sky.
But instead of creating works which imply depth past a facade, such as the arid dirt beneath a desert plain or the anticipation of reaching the last galaxy, Celmins places texture over thickness, focusing on surfaces rather than what lies beyond.
The artist, who graduated from UCLA with a master’s degree in painting in 1965, is more interested in the eddies that sculpt the face of the ocean rather than the deep sea beneath. She views the universe as a solid sheet of stars instead of a vastness of infinite depth.
And even more defamiliarizing, horizons and context clues lose out to endlessly repeating detail, such as desert scenes depicted as entire surfaces overwhelmed with rocks.
Celmins shares her perspective through a meticulous process of drawing and shading from photographs in order to create highly realistic images.
For instance, in works such as “Untitled (Big Sea #1),” the artist takes on every peak of every ripple in her seascapes to produce ocean views that look like crinkled bed sheets, or leaves us with space surveys that look like film plates smudged with white whorlsmark.
All this is done by varying the thickness of graphite or charcoal on the paper, ranging from the lighter textures in her earlier works in order to produce a hazy shadowing to her later pieces depicting the dense, heavy blackness of the night sky.
But Celmins’ work is not only limited to tight examinations of vast fields.
Her early drawings, greeting visitors as they enter the first gallery, have a closer tie to human history and memory.
The works reveal Celmins as a child of World War II, pulling from images of atomic explosions found in magazines or the decimation of Hiroshima.
And by rendering these scenes as pictures from torn scraps of paper, Celmins shares with us found objects ripped from her own past, left for us to pick up like litter blown on the street.
This period’s most enthralling piece is “Letter,” a collage modeled from a piece of mail sent by Celmins’ mother in Indiana to the artist during her college career in California.
With daughter gently mimicking mother through the soft writing on the drawing of an envelope, Celmins literally adds another layer of meaning by the postage stamps placed on top, filled with the smoke of bombs dropped during an air raid.
Walking through the exhibit, viewers see how the artist’s understanding of earth and space changes over time.
The artist shifts focus later in her career to studies of the desert and outer space. Celmins’ “Untitled (Desert-Galaxy)” presents the deep expanse of the night sky against a endless spread of desert, leaving the viewer to draw parallels between the points of light in one image and the sandy rocks of the other.
Her exploration of space becomes fully realized during work from the ’80s, leaving papers filled with gritty charcoal shading and erasing spots on the page to reveal swirling galaxies.
Some of these pieces, such as “Untitled #10,” feature a milky comet as a focal point in an otherwise disorienting universe.
After a hiatus from drawing to work on her painting, Celmins returned during the last two decades, leaving the expanse of space and diving into a cool exploration of terrestrial natural phenomenon.
As visitors walk out among 10 delicate images of spider webs, they’ll realize that one does not need to stretch out into the universe to find an eerie beauty in the natural world.
E-mail Guigayoma at jguigayoma@media.ucla.edu.