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Top 10 Museum Exhibits

Untitled (Web 2), 2001
McKee Gallery
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#3. Vija Celmins: A Drawings Retrospective
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles


Celmins began her career in the 1960s with coolly rendered realistic images of electric fans, handguns and World War II bombers. More recently she's been making "all over" images of desert floors, outer space or the ocean surface, their apparent uniformity built from a superabundance of subdued visual incidents. They're rigorous in what they exclude, and exciting in how they mobilize their reduced means to open the way to new perceptual and psychological vistas. This show was an almost literal eye opener.

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