- 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
- Nadel, Dan, Laura Phipps, Scott Rothkopf, and Elisabeth Sussman, editors. Sixties Surreal. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2025.
