Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster, 1964-1968 January 20, 2011

With a palette focused on the gradations between black and gray, Celmins has been known as a painter of refined representational images of night skies, ocean waves and spider webs. But her first subjects were war planes, smoking guns, and other images of death and disaster. In all of her work, the precisely rendered paintings suggest the importance of patience - the artist's, in making a precisely rendered painting, and ours, in viewing it.