
In 2002, Robert Gober interviewed Vija Celmins at her Long Island home. He asked her about her work habits: “Do you work every day?” Celmins said she didn’t. “I have always had a very complicated relationship with working—starting and stopping,” she said. Gober admitted that he hadn’t “really worked in a year and a half.”1 It is funny to read their anxious exchange about working (and not working) after seeing Vija Celmins / Robert Gober, the two-person show currently on view at Matthew Marks Gallery, in which their tenderly labored works invite viewers close.