Dimensions: image: 380 x 482 mm
Copyright: © Vija Celmins | CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED, Photo: Tate
Editor: Here we have Vija Celmins’ "Untitled (Web 3)," a print from 2002. It’s incredibly detailed, almost photographic in its realism, and creates a feeling of stillness, like a captured moment. What draws your eye when you look at it? Curator: It's interesting you say "captured moment," because that's exactly the feeling I get. The web, so fragile, is rendered with such meticulous care. It makes me wonder about the nature of perception – how Celmins transforms the ordinary into something monumental, almost meditative. Does the starkness of the monochrome affect your reading of it? Editor: It definitely adds to the sense of quiet contemplation. I guess I hadn’t thought about that stillness as something she actively created through the medium itself. Thanks! Curator: My pleasure. It’s a reminder that even the simplest subjects can hold profound depths.
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Untitled (Web 3) is a one-colour aquatint print, with burnishing, scraping and drypoint, of a spider’s web on Hahnemühle Copperplate paper. It was printed by Jennifer Turner and Carmen Schilaci at Gemini G.E.L. (Graphic Editions Limited) in Los Angeles, where it was published in 2002 in an edition of sixty-five. The copy held by ARTIST ROOMS is edition number 34/65, inscribed at the bottom left corner of the print and signed and dated by the artist at the bottom right in pencil. The subject matter of this print – as is the case with the majority of Vija Celmins’s drawings, prints and paintings – is based on a photograph of a spider’s web rather than the direct observation of nature. It is one of four numbered Untitled (Web) prints by Celmins in ARTIST ROOMS that utilise various printmaking techniques, presenting a series of four different web formations (Tate AR00476–AR00479). There is a gradual shift from Untitled (Web 1) to Untitled (Web 4) in the character of these printed webs: from a high contrast, carefully delineated construction to a blurry, greyscale image in which the gossamer threads seem to recede into the darkness, hardly differentiated at all. The curator Susan Lambert has described the basic premise of aquatint, which is an intaglio technique whereby the print surface is sunk beneath the areas that are to remain blank:
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