Vija Celmins is a Latvian-American artist born in 1938. She is known for her hyperrealistic paintings, drawings, and prints of natural landscapes and objects such as oceans, deserts, spider webs, and stars. Celmins immigrated to the United States in 1948 and studied art at the John Herron School of Art in Indianapolis and the University of California, Los Angeles. She gained recognition in the 1960s for her early works that depicted everyday objects such as pencils and erasers. In the 1970s, she shifted her focus to landscapes and began using photographs as source material for her work. Celmins has exhibited her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the United States and internationally. She has received many awards and honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997 and the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2017 Venice Biennale. Celmins currently lives and works in New York City.
