Vija Celmins was fascinated by images from an early age. As a young girl she moved with her parents from Latvia to Indianapolis in the USA and began collecting pictures from comic books and picture playing cards. ‘I had stacks of comics because I had sort of taught myself how to read, because I couldn’t speak English. I only spoke Latvian, really.’

 

Her interest in images continued, and in the 1960s Celmins began using photographs she found in magazines and books as a source for her art. Around this time she was also making sculpture based on everyday functional objects. Other artists in the 1960s such as Andy Warhol and Richard Hamilton were also making paintings and prints of found objects and images. These artists – known as pop artists – were using these sources to comment on popular culture and the brash consumerism of the day. Although Celmins’s work from this period is often discussed in relation to pop art, her ideas had more in common with the object paintings of artists such as René Magritte and Giorgio Morandi. She was inspired by their experimentation with object size and scale, and their depiction of objects detached from their original function.

 

Celmins's early object paintings, alongside her interest in scientific imagery, led to her making drawings and prints of seas, night skies and deserts. The first drawings she made using this type of imagery were based on photographs of planets and the surface of the moon. The late 1960s saw the culmination of the great ‘space race’ between the Soviet Union and the USA. On 20 July 1969 the spaceflight Apollo 11 landed on the moon and the media was full of dramatic images of outer space. Celmins was inspired by these images and began to use them in her work.