- Artist or Maker
- Vija Celmins
Latvia, Riga, active United States, born 1938 - Title
- Untitled (Comb)
- Date Made
- 1970
- Medium
- Enamel on wood
- Dimensions
- 75 × 14 5/8 × 2 3/8 in. (190.5 × 37.15 × 6.03 cm)
- Accession Number
- M.72.26
- Collecting Area
- Modern Art
- Curatorial Notes
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.
- Selected Bibliography
- A Focus on California: Selections from the Collection. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1984.
- Tuchman, Maurice. Ten Years of Contemporary Art Council Acquisitions: Inaugurating The New Contemporary Art Galleries. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1973.
- 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.
- Celmins, Vija, Ken Price and Matthew Higgs. Ken Price. Göttingen: Steidl; New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 2007.
- 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.
- Nadel, Dan, Laura Phipps, Scott Rothkopf, and Elisabeth Sussman, editors. Sixties Surreal. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2025.
- Copyright
- © Vija Celmins
