Vija Celmins

On Friday, October 25th we went to visit the Jewish Museum and also the Met Breuer to see the exhibitions of Edith Halpert and Vija Celmins.

In the Jewish Museum we find the pieces that Edith Halpert had curated for more than 40 years in America from modern artists. She was the first woman in the art field at that time and had a huge importance during the beginning of 20th century.

Vija Celmins is a 78 year old woman who is a work alcoholic and she produced a beautiful body of work. The subject matter she depicts is the sky, oceans ( waves ), deserts, night skies, galaxies, constellations, spiderwebs, antique writing slates. She paints in a photorealist way using lots of details with an extraordinary skill in a wide range of media. She works doing paintings, sculpture, drawings, and prints

They can take years to make and now they sell for several millions of dollars. She is known to do a redescription of those subject matters and her work is aligned with pop, minimalist and conceptual art at the same time.

Jewish Museum
1109 5th avenue
at 92sd street

Jewish Museum curator Stephen Brown

Stephen Brown explain how they received this Seagal’s piece and all the work involved in curating an exhibition on it. This installation from George Segal is a representation of a passage of the bible when Abraham was about to kill his own son as a demonstration of his faith and obedience and the artist Segal used this symbol to create a memorial for the event that occurred in 1970 where guards opened fire on students. The installation is composed by photographers and drawings that depicted that moment.

At that same meeting we heard the testimony of a Drew alumi, Douglas Caulk, who had been in this same class that we are going through right now and he described how that experience at Drew University was important in terms of his career during the past 50 years. Now he has his company Caulk Arts Inc. and he is specialized in solving problems for artists and museums in dealing with transportation and assembling an exhibition. They provide full service for museum collection management to corporations, foundations, private collections and artists. They meet International Museum Standards with his services and that means a lot of logistics, a diverse group of people involved in the transportation, qualified engineers and a worldwide network.

Caulk Arts Inc

80 Red Schoolhouse Road Suite 219, Chestnut Ridge, New York 10977, United States (845) 426-2971

After we went to see the exhibition on the second floor that was a retrospective of Edith Halpert work during the time she had her gallery

Edith Halpert and the Rise of American Art.
She was the first significant female gallerist in the United States for over 40 years. She supported many who became icons of American modernism. From that selection the ones that I liked the most

Georgia O’Keeffe

Georgia O’Keeffe

The Met Breuer
945 Madison Avenue

This building was previous the Whitney museum and was a project by the architect Breuer. Now the MET rented it and afterwards another institution is going to rent it.

Vija Celmins : To fix the image in Memory

Celmins said “if you really look at an image … it stays in your memory, so then memory does others things to it, Sometimes a work fades….”

The exhibition is a selection of approximately 120 works—from her earliest paintings made in Los Angeles in the 1960s to objects completed in New York in the last five years. She has been painting for more than fifty years and she has an extraordinary skill in a wide range of media such as paintings, sculpture, drawings, and prints. She can paint sometimes through direct observation but more often from photography. Her motifs are oceans, deserts, night skies, spiderwebs, antique writing slates, expanses of ocean waves, star-studded night skies, galaxies and constellations, clouds or the moon’s surface, rendered in graphite, charcoal or muted tones of oil paint.

I had seen her video where she explained the way she paints the skies and it is very amazing the amount of detail and patience that she use to stay during many months in a small piece of paper using only graphite. Her collection range in hues of black and white but even though creates intimacy with the viewer that goes from a close up to a more distance approach to get the hole image

Each piece can take years to make despite their often small size and seem so realistic as to be mistaken for photographs. She does a “redescription,” of the motifs she is representing like a little universe in each own subject matter. Her work is aligned with Pop, Minimal and Conceptual Art — and even Photo Realism