Vija Celmins
McKee Gallery
Vija Celmins’ paintings are dense and opaque, even when suggesting infinite galactic space. Though the night skies and ocean surfaces they so frequently and faithfully represent suggest the very stuff of which elegiac poems are made, as objects her paintings can seem bullying in their material insistence. “Lapidary” is a word that suits Celmins more, perhaps, than any artist around today, including her old Yale summer-school chum Brice Marden, now that he’s given up those smoothly encaustic, Ming-like veneers. Celmins, in fact, once made a group of trompe l’oeil pebbles (she cast them in bronze