Vija Celmins at SFMOMA

An exhibit spanning the career of 80-year-old Vija Celmins at SFMOMA is one of the weirdest, most obsessive, and eventually fascinating surveys I have seen at that museum. The show closes after this weekend before starting on a global tour, so you might want to check it out before it disappears.

Vija came to the Midwest with her Latvian family as a World War Two refugee and went to art school in Los Angeles in the 1960s. Her earliest work consists of flattened, desaturated paintings of ordinary objects such as the Lamp (1964) above, along with blown up sculptures of small objects such as erasers and a comb in the style of Claes Oldenburg.

In the late 1960s she began creating photoreal graphite pencil drawings taken from photos of the Pacific Ocean at Venice Beach that are so minutely detailed they defy belief.

There are lots of them in the exhibit, each unique but looking the same.

In the 1970s she discovered the Southwestern desert and applied the same approach...

...along with its night skies filled with galaxies of stars, drawing what is essentially a negative image with her graphite pencil filling in the dark sky.

In the 1980s she moved to New York City and began painting with oils again. Barrier (1984-85) was her first painting in a couple of decades.

She also painted the ocean again with oils...

...and returned to the desert floor with the above 1991 wood panel.

In the 1990s she turned to charcoal and created a remarkable series of spiderwebs, again using negative space. In other words, everything around the web has been filled in with charcoal except for the web itself which feels almost impossible.

The final display of OCD mastery from the early oughts is a set of childrens' vintage chalkboards, where she had a sculptor make wooden replicas, which she then painted with every scratch, smudge, crack and splinter intact. The show in its entirety is severe and a bit forbidding, which means there are not big crowds and you can almost have the exhibit to yourself. I have now gone back three times and each viewing reveals more strange splendors.