The Hammer Museum is the only American venue for the major traveling exhibition Vija Celmins: A Drawings Retrospective. This comprehensive examination of Celmins's drawings dating from the mid-1960s to the present features approximately 70 works on paper from all stages of the artist's career. Notable for its inclusion of many seminal, but rarely-exhibited works by one of the most important artists of the postwar generation, the exhibition will include many of the Celmins's most important series, including her delicate renderings of lunar, ocean, and desert surfaces as well as clouds, galaxies, and nocturnal skies. Depicted with exquisite, mesmerizing detail, her works often represent spatial ambiguity that challenges notions of realism and engages with larger questions of perception and knowledge.

Vija Celmins: A Drawings Retrospective has been organized by Jonas Storsve, Curator at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris where it will be on view October 25, 2006, through January 8, 2007, under the title Vija Celmins, l’Oeuvre dessiné. This exhibition is being organized at the Hammer Museum by Gary Garrels, Senior Curator.