Vija Celmins: Pressing Matters

If the past few years have been a quiet period for Vija Celmins, then we can now gratefully celebrate its end. It began in February with the Matthew Marks Gallery’s recap of her work since her last show in 2010, and will culminate at the end of next year in a vast retrospective opening at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. And, this spring we can enjoy her prints at the Drawing Room Gallery in East Hampton.

For any other artist so prolific and flexible in her choice of mediums (painting, sculpture, drawings, and prints), a print show might seem second-tier, an also-ran. Ms. Celmins, however, revels in the various techniques of relief and intaglio printing, easing in and out of wood engraving, mezzotint, aquatint, drypoint, and etching as others might change sweaters.

The Drawing Room displays just a dozen of these mostly recent works, a sample of all of these mediums. Those familiar with the artist’s oeuvre will recognize subjects she has addressed tirelessly through the decades — the night sky, a spiderweb, and the infinite sea. 

Her compositions are all horizon-less foreground. Waves and current are recognizable, but could easily be merely texture. The wood engravings of the ocean reveal her intricate slices of the wood’s endgrain, carved over and over again with grace and precision. Close up, their white negative space highlights the linear quality of the medium. From a few feet away, the elements blend in a way that resembles brush strokes. 

Contrasted with the inverse relationship of positive and negative space and the painterly surface of the mezzotints of the same subject matter, her prints become didactic in the most aesthetically pleasing way. The brain and the gut both react to her punch in a slightly woozy, intoxicated way.

Her mezzotints inspired from night skies are marked by rich, deep-dark surfaces, created by roughing up the surface of the printing plate with a tool called a rocker to absorb the ink. By smoothing out dots throughout the composition to be left as blank paper, she produces the stars as necessary contrast. There are several “Dark Sky” images on view. The show also offers etchings and aquatints that create the reverse effect — white expanses with black dots and blips, in one case in the same composition, presented like a diptych.

Her mezzotint spiderwebs are masterworks of the medium, pushing its inherent qualities to their maximum intensity. The dark backgrounds are interrupted only by the finest of lines to form an intricate network. Once again, the webs are all shallow foreground. She jettisons the superfluous to concentrate each composition’s impact. 

The versatility of Ms. Celmins’s process across land, sea, and air is remarkable. By taking the recognizable and creating confusion around that recognition, she forces us to consider the abstract in the real and the real in the abstract. It makes you want to applaud right there in the room, just to express your gratitude for such understated yet complicated magnificence. 

The New York Times noted earlier this year how scarce her work is in the marketplace. Collectors and institutions grab it up as soon as it becomes available. It is in evidence at the Drawing Room as well, where the pieces — artist’s and trial proofs — are clearly from her own collection. Red dots fill the exhibition’s price list, a testament to what fine examples are on view.

The back room of the gallery feels a bit like a scene from a science-fiction movie. Alabaster orbs and organic shapes, with their translucent qualities, look like beautiful pods from another planet. 

Working with stone from all over the world, Aya Miyatake finds unique pieces with hints of rose and gold and pulsating veins of white and gray. The burnished shapes the East Hampton artist coaxes from them are graceful and compact. They resemble natural forms at a point or two removed from Ms. Celmins’s nearby pieces. 

Here the subject appears abstract, with the look and feeling of something recalled or understood to be what the shape hints at it being. The titles, in her native Japanese, that often describe her work as “whale,” “round,” “oblique,” further illuminate or obscure their ultimate meaning.

Both exhibitions remain on view through June 26.