Vija Celmins: A Printmaking Retrospective Exhibition at the Secession

This exhibition at the Secession showcases over 70 printmaking works by Vija Celmins, spanning five decades of her career. The retrospective highlights her mastery of techniques like mezzotint, etching, and woodcut, exploring themes of seas, deserts, and night skies.

Vija Celmins, known since the 1970s for her evocative works depicting oceans, deserts, night skies, and spiderwebs across various media, presents her first solo exhibition in Austria at the Secession. This exhibition, comprising over 70 works from her printmaking oeuvre, was curated by the artist herself and spans five decades of her artistic output, from early etchings to previously unseen editions. Celmins bases her motifs on photographs and found prints, isolating them from their original context and reinterpreting them in new media. This process shifts focus from the subject matter to the material itself, examining its specific qualities and effects. Printmaking holds significant importance in Celmins' diverse practice, standing alongside drawing, painting, and sculpture. The exhibition delves into Celmins' profound interest in various artisanal processes, utilizing techniques such as scraping on copper plates, woodcutting, and drawing on stone. Her exceptional drawing skills inform her exploration of traditional printmaking. While lithography, closely related to drawing, was employed in the 1970s, the 1980s saw a dominance of intaglio methods like etching, mezzotint, and woodcut. Mezzotint, in particular, allows for a wide variation of velvety halftones, enabling Celmins to extract subtle tonal qualities from her black-and-white sources. Despite the considerable craftsmanship involved, her prints often obscure their making, revealing their nuanced richness and the intimacy of her patient appropriation process only upon closer inspection. Celmins' works masterfully balance abstraction and representation, surface and proportion, stillness and the suggestion of movement, creating an immersive experience of endless spaces that are then thoughtfully contained by the paper's edge, drawing attention back to the materiality and fictionality of the artwork.

Information regarding tickets and admission is available via a link to an external ticketing platform. Visitors are directed to 'shop.eventjet.at/secession' for booking details. The Secession is open Tuesday to Sunday from 10 AM to 6 PM, with current opening hours possibly available on the website.