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‘I crawl over the photograph like an ant, and I document my crawling on another surface,’ Vija Celmins has said of the way she transcribes photographs of vacant spider webs, choppy ocean surfaces, and pointillist night skies into delicately rendered drawings and paintings Throughout her sixty-year career, the Latvian-born artist has often been mischaracterised as a ‘photorealist’ who mechanically reproduces found images, but such a reading would elide the multitude of sensations contained in her work, which simultaneously depicts its subject and captures her own labour From afar, her constellations and waves can resemble impersonal, monochromatic screens; yet up close, they reveal expressive streaks of choppy ink With your nose against the glass, you can even see the seams on her paper, or a watermark in the shape of a lily Viewed as a whole, Celmins’s works constitute an exercise in learning how to look anew at our own surroundings   That range is on full display in the more than one hundred works now gathered at the Met Breuer, for her first large-scale retrospective since the 1990s The career-long survey, which travelled from San Francisco and Toronto, excavates the personal history behind a practice that can seem exclusively formalist Before the age of ten, Celmins had lived in three refugee camps, in Leipzig, Mannheim, and Esslingen She has described her process of  ‘crawling’ over photographs as an act of ‘redescribing’ – translating an image from one medium into another, most often from photographs into charcoal, oil, or graphite, but also from found objects into three-dimensional sculptures, made of bronze and wood In the resulting works there are echoes of a poet she admires, Czeslaw Milosz, who after being exiled from Poland described how ‘imagination can fashion a homeland’; through the act of ‘redescribing’, Clemins seems to inscribe her own, lost world into the present, even as it recedes from memory   Born in Riga in 1938, Celmins was soon displaced by World War II, eventually relocating to Indiana with her family In 1962, she graduated from the Yale Summer School