Charcoal on paper
Tate Collection
Works with images
General Collection
ARTIST ROOMS
National Heritage Memorial Fund
Art Fund
Collection
<a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/vija-celmins-2731" aria-label="More by Vija Celmins" data-gtm-name="header_link_artist" data-gtm-destination="page--artist">Vija Celmins</a>
Night Sky 19
ARTIST ROOMS
Acquired jointly with the National Galleries of Scotland through The d'Offay Donation with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund 2008
astronomy
landscape
night
sky
star
times of the day
universe
<p><span>Night Sky #19 </span>is a charcoal drawing on coated white paper that depicts a vast field of stars in the night sky. It is signed and dated by the artist at the bottom right corner of the landscape-oriented sheet of paper. This drawing – as is the case with the majority of Vija Celmins’s drawings, prints and paintings – is based on a photograph rather than the direct observation of nature. <span>Night Sky #19</span>, as its numerical title suggests, is one of an extensive series of night sky images produced by the artist in the 1990s, directly related to earlier representations of galaxies from the 1960s and 1970s, seen in one half of the dual-image drawing <span>Untitled (Desert–Galaxy)</span> 1974 (Tate AR00162). For both series Celmins obtained the source materials from books, newspapers and magazines: published photographic clippings that the artist used as a platform for her artistic production. As the art historian Briony Fer has commented:</p>
paper unique charcoal
14 March 2009 – 8 November 2009
2009-11-08
12 March 2009 – 8 November 2009
2009-11-08
2009-03-12
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Edinburgh, UK)
http://www.nationalgalleries.org/
2009-03-14
ARTIST ROOMS Vija Celmins
Collection based display
21 May 2011 – 30 July 2011
2011-07-30
21 May 2011 – 30 July 2011
2011-07-30
2011-05-21
Gracefield Arts Centre (Dumfries, UK)
http://www.dumgal.gov.uk/gracefield
2011-05-21
ARTIST ROOMS 2011: Vija Celmins
Loan-out
5 May 2012 – 24 March 2013
2013-03-24
5 May 2012 – 24 March 2013
2013-03-24
2012-05-05
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2012-05-05
ARTIST ROOMS Vija Celmins
Collection based display
29 March 2014 – 28 June 2014
2014-06-28
29 March 2014 – 28 June 2014
2014-06-28
2014-03-29
Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum & Arts Centre (Lochmaddy, UK)
2014-03-29
ARTIST ROOMS 2014: Vija Celmins
Loan-out
15 December 2018 – 12 January 2020
2020-01-12
15 December 2018 – 31 March 2019
2019-03-31
2018-12-15
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco, USA)
1 May 2019 – 31 August 2019
2019-08-31
2019-05-01
Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto, Canada)
http://www.ago.net
1 October 2019 – 12 January 2020
2020-01-12
2019-10-01
The Met Breuer (New York, USA)
2018-12-15
Vija Celmins
Loan-out
3 February 2024 – 18 May 2025
2025-05-18
3 February 2024 – 4 May 2024
2024-05-04
2024-02-03
Hatton Gallery (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK)
17 May 2024 – 18 August 2024
2024-08-18
2024-05-17
Burgh Hall (Dunoon, UK)
19 October 2024 – 12 January 2025
2025-01-12
2024-10-19
The Box (Plymouth, UK)
2024-02-03
Vija Celmins
Loan-out
15 June 2025 – 21 September 2025
2025-09-21
15 June 2025 – 21 September 2025
2025-09-21
2025-06-15
Fondation Beyeler (Riehen/Basel, Switzerland)
http://www.beyeler.com
2025-06-15
VIJA CELMINS
Loan-out
Night Sky #19
support: 570 × 673 mm
frame: 608 × 710 × 38 mm
<a href="/search?gid=999999788" data-gtm-name="tombstone_link_bequest" data-gtm-destination="list-page--search-results">ARTIST ROOMS</a>
Acquired jointly with the National Galleries of Scotland through The d'Offay Donation with assistance from the <a href="/search?gid=999999967" data-gtm-name="tombstone_link_bequest" data-gtm-destination="list-page--search-results">National Heritage Memorial Fund</a> and the <a href="/search?gid=999999968" data-gtm-name="tombstone_link_bequest" data-gtm-destination="list-page--search-results">Art Fund</a> 2008
<div class="text">
<p>
<i>Night Sky #19 </i>is a charcoal drawing on coated white paper that depicts a vast field of stars in the night sky. It is signed and dated by the artist at the bottom right corner of the landscape-oriented sheet of paper. This drawing – as is the case with the majority of Vija Celmins’s drawings, prints and paintings – is based on a photograph rather than the direct observation of nature. <i>Night Sky #19</i>, as its numerical title suggests, is one of an extensive series of night sky images produced by the artist in the 1990s, directly related to earlier representations of galaxies from the 1960s and 1970s, seen in one half of the dual-image drawing <i>Untitled (Desert–Galaxy)</i> 1974 (Tate <a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/celmins-untitled-desert-galaxy-ar00162" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>AR00162</span></a>). For both series Celmins obtained the source materials from books, newspapers and magazines: published photographic clippings that the artist used as a platform for her artistic production. As the art historian Briony Fer has commented:</p>
<p class="cttext">
</p><blockquote>If <i>Night Sky #19 </i>is a drawing of anything, it is a drawing of a photograph culled from an astronomy book … Whilst I don’t think the effect of her work is to make us feel lost in the enormity of a sky we could say that we do get lost in translation between photography and drawing and painting. These are the translations that seem to interest her most.</blockquote>
<blockquote>(Fer 2004, p.102.)</blockquote>
<p>The mid-1990s marked a return to drawing for the artist, who had devoted most of the previous decade to her painting practice, which she had abandoned in the late 1960s. The 1980s also ushered in a more sustained commitment to printmaking, which became an integral part of Celmins’s work. Across these variations in media the night sky remained a constant preoccupation: prints like <i>Mount Holyoke </i>1987 (Tate <a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/celmins-mount-holyoke-ar00471" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>AR00471</span></a>) and the four-part series <i>Concentric Bearings </i>1984–5 (Tate <a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/celmins-concentric-bearings-a-ar00469" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>AR00469</span></a>, <a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/celmins-concentric-bearings-d-ar00470" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>AR00470</span></a>, <a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/celmins-concentric-bearings-b-ar00482" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>AR00482</span></a>, <a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/celmins-concentric-bearings-c-ar00483" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>AR00483</span></a>) all made use of a constellation, galaxy or night sky photographic source. </p>
<p>The curator Jonas Storsve has highlighted Celmins’s shift from the method of earlier works on paper such as <i>Untitled (Desert–Galaxy)</i> to that of the 1990s drawings, declaring:</p>
<p class="cttext">
</p><blockquote>If the subject was the same, the technique had undergone a radical change: instead of graphite on an acrylic ground, Celmins opted for charcoal and an eraser … she now applied the charcoal by hand directly onto the paper and used the eraser to draw the fields of stars, digging down through the charcoal ground to reach the white surface of the paper.</blockquote>
<blockquote>(Storsve 2006, p.24.)</blockquote>
<p>This is the drawing process undertaken in <i>Night Sky #19</i>. The charcoal has been rubbed deep into the paper in a slow, accumulative process. This background is blackest at the bottom edge, where traces of pure, unblended charcoal are visible along the loosely delineated margin of the rectangular drawing space. An electric eraser burrows through these many layers of dusty charcoal to create starry pinpricks of light as a kind of negative drawing – a process that moves backwards towards the original colour and surface of the paper. This technique can also be seen in <i>Web #1 </i>1999 (Tate <a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/celmins-web-1-ar00164" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>AR00164</span></a>). Some of the stars are more nebulous than others, having been only partially erased from the dense charcoal field. This creates a greyscale range of tonal variations between the black of the charcoal and the white of the paper, giving the drawing a mottled effect in which the celestial clusters appear to emit varying levels of brightness in the night sky (thereby suggesting a range of distances from Earth). </p>
<p>The art critic Adrian Searle has described the night sky in Celmins’s work as ‘an image with no horizon, it is entirely frontal’ (Anthony d’Offay Gallery 2001, p.9). This reinforces the close relationship between the type of images Celmins chooses to work with and the flat plane of the drawing surface. Her translation from photograph to drawing does not seek to duplicate the source image accurately or illusionistically, but rather, as the artist articulates: </p>
<p class="cttext">
</p><blockquote>In the drawing, I try to present a certain kind of sensibility about making a drawing, about restraint, about not expressing, but sort of toning down an image until there is very little gesture in the strokes, but there remains a sensuality to explore. </blockquote>
<blockquote>(Quoted in Anthony d’Offay Gallery 2001, p.54.) </blockquote>
<p>This emphasis on achieving a restrained yet sensual type of drawing underscores the intensely material base of Celmins’s highly conceptual approach to working with an existing image. Complicating the reproducibility of her photographic sources by subjecting them to painstakingly precise handiwork produces a drawing that is suspended between mechanical detachment and a physical involvement with surface and medium. The artist herself suggests: ‘Drawing is kind of like a dry world, the dry world of graphite and little pieces of charcoal … Charcoal’s a bit like paint really, it dribbles away into dust and you can work with your hands.’ (Quoted in ibid., p.56.)</p>
<p>
<b>Further reading </b>
<br/>Adrian Searle and Anne Seymour, <i>Vija Celmins – Drawings of the Night Sky</i>, exhibition catalogue, Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London 2001, reproduced p.43. <br/>Briony Fer, ‘Focus – <i>Night Sky #19 </i>1998’, in Lane Relyea, Robert Gober and Briony Fer, <i>Vija Celmins</i>, London and New York 2004, pp.102–7, reproduced pp.102–3.<br/>Jonas Storsve and others, <i>Vija Celmins: Dessins = Drawings</i>, exhibition catalogue, Centre Pompidou, Paris 2006, reproduced p.133. </p>
<p>Stephanie Straine <br/>May 2010</p>
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Summary
2012-07-03T00:00:00
summary
SHORT_TEXT
<p>Celmins's intense monochromatic images of the night sky, based on photographs, focus on small and individual marks in the context of vastness. The images seem fragile because they record a specific human glimpse through a telescope or camera which is ephemeral and frozen in time. Celmins's serial exploration of her subjects, including the night sky, allows the artist to exploit the distinct characteristics of the variety of media she uses. Celmins has explained that her galaxy drawings stem from a love of exploring "the blackness of the pencil". The charcoal ground has a dark opacity but contains endless variations. Celmins uses an eraser to bring out the stars in the night sky.</p>

Online caption
2009-04-16T00:00:00
online-caption
ONLINE_CAPTION
astronomy landscape night sky star times of the day universe