{"data":{"id":"245","type":"artist","attributes":{"id":245,"topgoose_id":2537,"tms_id":245,"display_name":"Vija Celmins","sort_name":"Celmins Vija","display_date":"1938–","begin_date":"1938","end_date":"0","biography":"\u003cp\u003eVija Celmins is known for her painstakingly rendered photorealist paintings and drawings, which examine such subjects as desert and ocean surfaces and nocturnal skies. The still lifes she made in the early 1960s, however, are among the artist’s most restrained and introspective works. In a series executed in 1964, while still a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, Celmins painted domestic objects from her Venice, California, studio— a lamp, a hotplate, a fan, a knife resting on a saucer—as an exercise in close looking. Situating these everyday things that relate to the basic necessities of heat, food, and light within fields of gray or brown, she created muted grounds that spurned the slick finishes and bright Pop colors favored by other Southern California artists at that time.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn\u003cem\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/em\u003e\u003ca href=\"/collection/works/9516\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eHeater\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e, a characteristic work from this series, a small space heater emits a contained orange glow while its electrical cord trails out of the picture plane, suggesting a larger space beyond the otherwise flattened composition. A tension between the illusion of warmth that radiates from luminous coils of \u003cem\u003eHeater\u003c/em\u003e and its physical absence from the canvas adds to the painting’s unnerving impact. While the subject of this work seems innocuous, its somber, shadowy rendering suggests something more ominous. Indeed, such darker subtexts appear in other, more pointedly political and austere works from this period. Celmins had begun looking to mass media—a \u003cem\u003eTime\u003c/em\u003e magazine cover depicting the 1965 Watts uprising in Los Angeles, and images of fighter planes on her television—for source material that reflected the turbulence of the 1960s.\u003c/p\u003e","on_view":false,"artport":false,"biennial":true,"collection":true,"ulan_id":"500078777","wikidata_id":"Q465777","created_at":"2017-08-30T17:26:49.000-04:00","updated_at":"2026-03-30T07:03:52.559-04:00","links":{"artworks":"/api/artists/245/artworks","exhibitions":"/api/artists/245/exhibitions"}}}}