The exhibition Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is a privilege to behold. It is not only the images, but the retrospective itself that becomes fixed in memory as a lived experience. Celmin's work offers an encounter with nature, the universe, and ultimately the self. It casts the viewer in the role of the figure in Caspar David Friedrich's Monk by the Sea, who is enraptured by the sublime vastness of the cosmos. As my one-time professor, the late, great Robert Rosenblum suggested, Friedrich's painting and evocations of the Sublime were translated into abstract terms by Mark Rothko in large-scale paintings that envelop the viewer in a colored, luminous "nothingness." Celmins returns us … [Read more...]