The Carnegie Int'l: Vija Celmins & Mark Bradford

I don't usually think of Vija Celmins' paintings as being particularly bleak. Instead they're achingly beautiful, even delicate, and their starfields stick in the imagination like a pop tune. But in this year's Carnegie International, they are something else: Reminders.

It's pretty rare to see two Celminses in a gallery, but nine is disorienting. Eight of them are starscapes, such as Night Sky #2 (right), a 1991 painting from the Art Institute of Chicago. The ninth, the National Gallery of Art's 1988 untitled (Comet) is the only one to feature an object we recognize to be in motion.

One Celmins is a morsel, nine of them is an experience. Surrounded, I felt small, alone, a mass of carbon in the middle of a vast, turbulent, changing galaxy. The Celmins gallery seems like International curator Douglas Fogle's way of hammering the point that we're just us, one species on one planet in one galaxy. After seeing Thomas Hirschhorn's Cavemanman references to suicide bombers, and Matthew Monahan's post-apocalyptic statuary, and Cao Fei's soul-deadening Chinese factories and on and on, the Celminses seem to say: Humanity is a nice idea but for now bleakness is the present condition. Get used to the bleak.

The Celmins gallery is in the middle of the International, but its 'bookend' is the show's first gallery, a tour de force of three Mark Bradfords.  Two are the L.A.-based artist's familiar dystopian mixed-media collage 'paintings,' apparently bird's-eye views of desolate, empty, possibly abandoned urban areas. [Image at right.] The works are hung on the left and right walls of the room. Like the Celminses, they're landscape paintings with a different perspective on 'land.'

In between them, on a wall of its own, is A Thousand Daddies (2008), actual posters (plus some Bradfordian collage) that read, "My child says DADDY..." They are urban advertisements for child custody and divorce attorneys. ("1-866-72-DADDY") The gallery is a devastating, affecting declaration of dysfunction. But there's one more Bradford artwork to come.

It is on the Carnegie's roof, unseen by show-goers but visible to anyone looking in on us from, say, somewhere in one of Vija Celmins' paintings: Here.

Related: The 2008 Carnegie Int'l: Woe the humanity.