Night Sky #5
Vija Celmins
American, born Latvia 1938
1992
An oil painting on canvas mounted on wood panel that painstakingly renders a field of tiny stars against a deep black, aiming to translate the immensity and stillness of the night sky through exacting hand-painted marks.
What strikes you is the somber, velvety black studded with innumerable small, almost luminous points—so uniformly precise that the surface reads as both photographic and palpably hand-made.
By converting photographic images of the sky into obsessively detailed painted surfaces, Celmins collapses the distance between mechanical reproduction and intimate labor, creating a meditative, anti-gestural strand in late twentieth-century painting that reshaped how artists address scale, perception, and the natural world.
Medium
Oil on canvas mounted on wood panel
Dimensions
31 x 37 1/2" (78.7 x 95.3 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Gift of UBS
Accession
94.2002
Palette
Exhibitions
