Vija Celmins Livres

For over 40 years Ken Price has been heavily invested in the creation and innovation of form and color in ceramic sculpture. His adventurous work has pushed the boundaries of structure and glazing, creating remarkably lively shapes and color patterns and cementing his reputation as one of the most influential artists working in the medium today. This volume highlights Price's newest work as well as a retrospective sampling from the artist's long career in sculpture and drawing. Price's recent sensuously shaped fetish-like objects are meticulously painted and sanded to create rich, patterned skins with jewel-like surfaces. His brilliantly-colored drawings depict an often fantastic realm of rushing lava, raging seas and roaming creatures. A very important facet of Price's oeuvre, the drawings highlight themes that run throughout his work, and show Price to be a fine and original draftsman. In addition to the 60 color reproductions included here, fellow Los Angeles artist Vija Celmins contributes an interview with Price, further investigating his motivations and processes, contextualized in the California art community he helped to create.

New York artist Vija Celmins has made many images of the night sky--paintings, drawings and prints of gorgeous richness. In The Stars , she and her collaborator, the essayist and translator Eliot Weinberger, devote an artist's book to the theme. Celmins created three celestial prints for the project, which she also designed. One print, inspired by the worn binding of an early twentieth-century Japanese book, becomes the volume's mottled deep-blue cover; the second and third prints are images of the night sky, one of them negative--dark stars on a pale ground. For the text, Weinberger assembled a catalogue of descriptions of the stars drawn from around the world, and from an array of historical, literary and anthropological sources. This mythopoetic charting of the night sky evokes the vastness of the human imagination's response to a space itself vast and unknowable. Appearing in English and also in Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese and Maori, the text supplements Celmins's images visually as well as verbally. The Stars was originally a limited-edition livre d'artiste published this year by the Library Council of The Museum of Modern Art.

Die Publikation bringt die beiden Künstler Vija Celmins aus New York und Gerhard Richter aus Köln in einen transatlantischen Dialog und macht überraschende Verbindungen sichtbar. Neben der thematischen Nähe und der künstlerischen Arbeit mit fotografischen Vorlagen ist es die Frage nach den elementarsten Bedingungen des Darstellens, die Celmins und Richter beschäftigt und vereint. Was ist Realität, was ist Repräsentation? Und wie kann die Wahrnehmung, das Sehen selbst, sichtbar gemacht werden?