Vija celmins - television and disaster 1964-1966

On view at LACMA from March 13-June 5, 2011, Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster 1964--1966 explores an essential and often overlooked period of the artist's work. Celmins is best known as a painter of refined representational images—including night skies, ocean waves and spider webs. However, the images that first grounded her interest as a young artist in Los Angeles in the 1960s are characterized by violent themes such as crashing warplanes, smoking handguns, and other images of death and disaster influenced by the violence of the era and the mass media that represented it.