Dimensions: image: 389 x 482 mm
Copyright: © Vija Celmins | CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED, Photo: Tate
Curator: Vija Celmins’ "Untitled (Web 4)" presents a stark, almost photographic rendering of a spiderweb against a dark ground. The delicate lines belie the printmaking process. Editor: It's so quiet. So subtle and still. Makes you think, doesn't it? All that meticulous labor, the delicate tracery suspended in an abyss. Curator: Celmins often returns to themes of nature and the cosmos, pushing the boundaries of representation and perception. Her work encourages us to consider the power dynamics embedded within observation. Editor: Yes, the web itself – a symbol of entrapment, vulnerability… or perhaps resilience? I’m caught in its intricate beauty and its potential for danger. Curator: Indeed. It's the duality, the tension between the beautiful and the unsettling, that makes Celmins’ work so compelling. Editor: It stays with you, like a quiet, persistent hum. A reminder of the unseen forces shaping our world.
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Untitled (Web 4) is a one-colour photogravure print, with burnishing and drypoint, of a spider’s web on Hahnemühle Copperplate paper. It was printed and published by Gemini G.E.L. (Graphic Editions Limited), Los Angeles, in an edition of sixty-five plus ten artist’s proofs. The copy held by ARTIST ROOMS is edition number 34/65, inscribed at the bottom left corner 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 photogravure, writing that it is:
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