Hamptons International Film Festival (HIFF), announced today they are welcoming the world-renowned artist and longtime Sag Harbor resident Vija Celmins as their featured poster artist. The 33rd annual festival will run as an expanded 11-day event from October 3 – 13, 2025.
HamptonsFilm shared the poster art for the 2025 festival, continuing the 33-year tradition of featuring artwork from local Hamptons artists. This year’s poster features the internationally acclaimed artist Vija Celmins’ piece “Ocean”: 1975, © Vija Celmins, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.
Vija Celmins has long been admired for her meticulous renderings of natural imagery, including ocean waves, desert floors, and night skies. Her paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints depict scenes that are too vast or mercurial to be fixed in the mind’s eye. Her work has been featured in major institutions including MoMA, the Whitney, and the Centre Pompidou, and has had more than 40 solo exhibitions and retrospectives, and her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the Carnegie Prize. Vija is currently the subject of a comprehensive solo exhibition featuring a selection of her paintings, drawings, and sculptures spanning from the 1960s to the present day, at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland.
“Vija Celmins is a celebrated visual artist known for her intricate drawings of oceans, stars, and desert landscapes. Her minimal, contemplative yet daring work mirrors the spirit of the films we champion at HIFF and reflects the natural beauty of the Hamptons. Having been inspired by Vija’s art for many many years, I am deeply proud and grateful to her for sharing her extraordinary work with us as the 2025 HIFF poster artist,” said Toni Ross, local East End artist and HIFF co-founder and founding Chairman of the Board.
Please visit www.hamptonsfilmfest.org for further information on HIFF and all additional year-round programming.
ABOUT HAMPTONSFILM
HamptonsFilm, home of the Hamptons International Film Festival (HIFF) was founded onin 1992 to celebrate the art of film and to introduce a unique and varied spectrum of international films and filmmakers to our audiences. A non-profit organization with year-round screenings of global narrative and documentary films, an annual Screenwriters Lab, a summer documentary showcase, and extensive educational initiatives, HamptonsFilm offers programs that enlighten, educate, and provide invaluable exposure for filmmakers, while also providing the East End of Long Island with an educational and cultural experience that enriches the lives of its citizens and contributes to the local economy. HIFF, celebrating its 33rd year, is an annual premiere film event in New York State, and an intimate showcase of some of the year’s best offerings in contemporary cinema from around the world. Awarding prizes to filmmakers in cash and goods and services of over $130,000 each year, with over $5 million awarded in competition funds and services over the decades, our program continues to play an important role during awards season. For more information, please visit hamptonsfilmfest.org.
ABOUT VIJA CELMINS
Vija Celmins has long been admired for her meticulous renderings of natural imagery, including ocean waves, desert floors, and night skies. Her paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints depict scenes that are too vast or mercurial to be fixed in the mind’s eye. She first became interested in representing the visible world during the early 1960s, when she began to paint the objects in her Los Angeles studio — a lamp, a hot-plate, a heater, and other fixtures of everyday life — before turning her attention to photographs found in magazines and history books. By the end of the 1960s, when she first developed her all-over compositions of waves, rocks, and celestial bodies, she had set aside paint on canvas in favor of graphite on paper. When she began painting again in the 1980s, drawing and printmaking remained central to her art. Regarding her commitment to the material aspects of her process, Celmins has said, “I believe if there is any meaning in art, it resides in the physical presence of a work.”
Vija Celmins (b. 1938) was born in Riga, Latvia, and immigrated to the United States with her family in the late 1940s. She studied at the John Herron School of Art in Indiana and at Yale University before moving to Los Angeles in 1962 to pursue a master’s degree at UCLA. Celmins remained in Los Angeles until 1981, when she moved to New York, where she currently lives and works. In 1992 the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia organized the first retrospective of her work. Since then she has had one-person exhibitions at numerous museums, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Menil Collection in Houston. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1996 and received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997.
