Vija Celmins: Intense Realism

American artist Vija Celmins displays her love of the natural world (the night sky, the desert floor, the ocean) in her magnificently dense drawings. By honing in on a small corner of these natural spaces and meticulously rendering them in a modest scale Celmins turns reality into an impossibility, making real world scenery both unreal and overwhelming. Celmins' purposeful mark making breaks the boundaries of the paper and presents our world's overlooked majesty in a format that is incapable of being ignored. Vija Celmins: Intense Realism, the new exhibit in gallery 321 at the Saint Louis Art Museum, offers a selection of her work made using several techniques.

Tue.-Sun. (Dec. 12-May 10, 2015). Saint Louis Art Museum in Forest Park (314-721-0072 or www.slam.org). Free admission.
Fridays, 10 a.m.-9 p.m.; Tuesdays-Thursdays, Saturdays, Sundays, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Starts: Dec. 12. Continues through May 10, 2014