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“I try to use an image because it attracts you to the painting. You know, you want to go in the painting. But the painting’s not a window. The painting has its own reality.” —Vija Celmins

For more than 50 years, Latvian-born, New York-based painter Vija Celmins (b. 1938) has been making the same paintings. Well, not exactly. Celmins is known for her subtle, exquisitely detailed images of the physical world. Many of her works repeat the same themes and even imagery over and over, in an effort to distill them to their very nature and challenge the perception of our relationship to them. One of the few women to be recognized as a significant artist in 1960s Los Angeles, Celmins is now the subject of her first retrospective in North America in over 25 years. It is now the last week for Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory, on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through March 31, 2019. The exhibition travels to the Met Breuer in New York from September 24, 2019–January 12, 2020. For this video, SFMoMA visited Celmins in her New York studio to talk about her process and the aims of her exquisitely detailed, often repetitive work.

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