Vija Celmins

In 1995, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain presented a wide selection of Vija Celmins’s work. Her paintings and drawings evoke boundless expanses, infinite spaces, universal dimensions, horizons as far as the eye can see—elements that defy all possible representations within the limits imposed by the canvas, but where the artist nonetheless stays scrupulously true to reality.
The texts and images in the catalog published for the exhibition retrace this original approach, which Robert Storr summed up as follows: “her obsession consists in realizing the enigmatic poetical fusion between the absolute particular and infinity.”