Matthew Marks Gallery’s show of Vija Celmins’ mid-80s prints includes her iconic images of the ocean’s surface, star-filled night skies and a rocky patch of ground in the desert, all huge spaces which the artist engages on a human scale. Night scenes and land/seascapes look like generic sites until closer inspection reveals the specificity of each in the mind-boggling detail Celmins affords each wave or rock. Here, she continues to juxtapose the vast and the minute by picturing a huge tree in an etching less than four inches tall, ignoring details of leaves and bark and instead putting the emphasis the mass and silhouette of a giant that necessarily contains worlds of detail. (On view in Chelsea through June 27th).
