Wednesday warmth. Latvian-American artist Vija Celmins is best known for her meticulous depictions of natural phenomena, from oceans to spiderwebs. But at the start of her career, she turned to found imagery of mundane objects for inspiration, much like her contemporaries Andy Warhol and Richard Hamilton. One such image resulted in this poetic rendering of a heater, its trailing cable the only suggestion of a world beyond the painting’s flat grey plane. The work is a far cry from Pop Art, however, betraying instead the influence of artists like René Magritte and Giorgio Morandi upon Celmins, who admired “their experimentation with object size and scale, and depiction of objects detached from their original function”, according to the Tate.
