Last year, in 2024, Louise, our friend Stephen Vranch, and I attended the exhilarating exhibitions of three female artists: Outi Pieski from Finland; Beatriz Milhazes from Portugal; and Malgorozata Mirga-Tas from the Roma community in Poland - see my earlier blogposts. Earlier this year, 2025, the three of us attended the exhibition celebrating the work of Ithell Coloquhoun, a British artist born in Imperial India in 1906 - and last week we saw the Liliane Lijn show a few days before it ended. At first, I thought that the Lijn show was only working for me at the cerebral level. How wrong I was. Once I was fully exposed to the wonders of kinetic art, I was hooked - especially when wrapped in the darkness of a Tate chamber where all light has been excluded apart from the rays emitting from the exhibits themselves.
Liliane Lijn is a ground-breaking American-born artist working in the field of kinetic art - (any art form that incorporates motion as an essential element of its design).
 |
| Liliane Lijn in Vienna, April 2025 |
Liliane Lijn was born in New York City in 1939, four months after her mother and grandmother arrived by boat from Antwerp. Her parents were from Russian Jewish families and they separated when Liliane was 9 years old. By the time she was 15, Liliane was with her father and brother in Geneva. Soon she was living with her mother in Lugano and attending school there where she became fluent in French and Italian. She became friends with Nina Thoeren whose mother was a Surrealist painter - and that changed the direction of her life. By 1958, she was a student at the Sorbonne studying archaeology and at the Ecole du Louvre she was reading Art History. Now she began to draw and paint on her own and take part in meetings of the Surrealist group where she met Andre Breton.
In 1961, Lijn was back in New York and married to the Greek artist Takis. Here she started working with
plastics, experimenting with reflection, motion and light. Back in Paris in 1963 she exhibited Poem Machines. The American poet John Ashbery described the show at the Libraire Anglaise:'Electric lights flash on and off Plexiglass constructions, creating a tangle of transparent shadows called 'Echo Lights' by the artist. Her 'Vibrographs' are wheels revolving too fast for you to read the words printed on them, but perhaps they affect you subconsciously like subliminal advertising.'
Lign was becoming a cutting edge force in the movement from the mechanical to the electronic in art.
The first space orbit by the Soviet cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, in 1961 reinforced Lign's interest in orbiting forms - she is still fascinated and has a current connection with NASA as an international artist. After marrying Takis, her visits to Greece yielded, in the words of the art historian, Dr. Sarah Wilson: 'A dazzling encounter with land, light and sea - with ancient mythologies, with the skin of things versus oracular depth, with passionate love and loss'. Her work now begins to embody an exploration of the tension between ancient, primordial visions and contemporary techno-culture.
 |
| The world of Koans |
In 1965, Lijin began working with cone-shaped Koans which continues to the present. Once more, Lijn is using kinesis - the power of movement - in her words 'to re-energise the word, to give it back power and fresh meaning'. The word 'Koan' is taken from Zen Buddhism meaning a puzzling, often paradoxical statement or story, used as an aid to meditation and a means of gaining spiritual awakening. Inspired by Robert Graves "The Greek Myths", Lijn became fascinated with feminist mythography as a counter to male patriarchy and misogyny.
 |
| Kinesis - the power of movement - copper and light and meditation |
In 1966, Lijn and Takis separated and she moved to London where she invented kinetic clothing. She also began her series of rotating Linear Light Columns in which metal cylinders, wound with copper wire, are used to reflect light and so, for the artist, make visible invisible connections between time and frequency. These were followed by a series of works made with tank and gunsight prisms. In Sua Memoria (1971-72), made in memory of her father, is typical of her use of reflected light in a darkened space - for us as visitors the highpoint of our time at the Tate exhibition. The art critic, Jasia Reichardt, has said: 'There is an intersection in her work at which science fiction, religion and quantum physics converge'. It was during this time that Lijn wrote an autobiographical illustrated prose poem: Crossing Map in which she tracks an invisible human being travelling at the speed of light.
 |
| Conjunction of Opposites: Lady of the Wild Things (1983) and Woman of War (1986) |
From 1969, Lijn made London her base with a new partner, the photographer and industrialist Stephen Weiss. Ten years later and now in her forties, Lijn's creativity took a fresh turn with her construction of larger than life 'biomorphic' goddesses which symbolise female energy and power - for instance in her 1983/86 work: Conjunction of Opposites comprising Lady of the Wild Things and Woman of War. During the nineties, Lijn turned her attention inward, using her own body with video and light. Guy Brett, an early curator of kinetic art, sees Lijn's work as an attempt to 'integrate light (neon, video, fire) with bronze - transmuting a traditional material into a new and vibrant element by juxtaposing it with new technologies'.
 |
| Electric Bride |
 |
| Arise Alive - Tate St Ives 2025 |
Lijn is now celebrated with honours from the Universities of Reading, Warwick and Leeds as well as residencies in the USA and France. She attended the opening night at Tate St Ives in person.
No comments:
Post a Comment