From 1964 to 1970, Vija Celmins created paintings and sculptures of personal belongings and mundane objects such as household appliances, pencils, erasers, and this comb. A “memorial piece”—as she called it—to the Surrealist artist René Magritte, Comb was inspired in part by his 1952 painting Personal Values, which pictures a room filled with incongruous and oversized objects. To make this sculpture, Celmins drew the comb’s shape on a large piece of wood, which she had roughly cut at a lumberyard. She then laboriously sanded it by hand and coated it with several layers of lacquer to achieve a seamless, tortoiseshell finish. Though Comb appears industrially manufactured, Celmins calls attention to her painstaking process by carefully lettering the word “handmade” at the top of the work.

Wall label, 2021.

• Celmins, Vija, Ken Price and Matthew Higgs. Ken Price. Göttingen: Steidl; New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 2007.

  
  

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• Barron, Stephanie, Michel Draguet, and Sara Cochran. Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Belgium: Ludion, 2006.
• Garrels, Gary. Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in association with Yale University Press, 2018.