Invisible Worlds by Liliane Lijn (b. 1939, New York, USA) explores her wide range of interests, particularly the exploration of light and its interaction with various new materials. Lijn’s work draws inspiration from both man-made and natural details, along with elements of mythology, poetry, science, and technology. She is dedicated to the development of language, collaborates across disciplines, and creates interactive art that invites viewer participation.
For over six decades, working at the intersection of visual art, literature, and scientific thought, creating an extensive array of works that include sculpture, site-specific installations, paintings, and moving images. Lijn’s work reveals a connection with Surrealist ideas, ancient mythologies, and feminist, scientific, and linguistic thought. A key focus of which is considering how to visualise the invisible, using the latest materials and experimenting with reflection, motion, and light. She researched invisibility, using and exploring the visualisation of electronic waves, forces, vibration, light, and sound.
Before settling in London, Lijn lived in Paris and Athens, where she was among a group of artists and poet friends defining the Kinetic art movement – one connected to space technology and cosmic spirituality. During this period, Lijn became one of the first women artists to experiment with kinetic sculpture, sparking a lifelong commitment to the understanding of energy. The materials she uses – unconventional and often industrial, such as plastics, prisms, and copper wire – are intrinsic to the ideas she explores, becoming the source in which she can experiment. The artist also predominantly works in series, allowing her to explore her complex ideas, experiments, and varied use of materials through iterations of the same work type.
Her talk part of Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions: Matter and Light at the Victoria and Albert Museum highlighted her painting, drawing, sculptural, film work, and installations. The talk centred on her sculptural light works from the 1980s, as well as a survey of her oeuvre, showing works from the late 1950s and today. Influenced by the second wave of feminism and her own experiences as a woman, Lijn became increasingly focused on the human form and the female body. In her sculptures from the 1980s, Lijn presents futuristic and female archetypes, part machine, part animal, and part plant, constructed from soft feather dusters, synthetic fibres, and industrial materials such as piano wire, steel, and optical glass prisms. These works reflect her ongoing exploration of a new, feminine form.
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Liliane Lijn was recipient of a retrospective exhibition in 2005 at the Mead Gallery, University of Warwick Arts Centre and a solo show at England & Co in 2006, Liliane Lijn: Selected Works 1959-1980. Lijn is currently working on her Solar Hills project: large-scale solar installations in the landscape, the outcome of her residency at the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. In November 2008, Lijn was one of the five artists featured in the BBC1 program Let There Be Light in the Imagine, a series presented by Alan Yentob. Recent highlights include exhibitions at the Riflemaker Gallery and the ICA in London, as well as “Poem Game,” which was part of the Serpentine Poetry Marathon curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2018. Recent exhibitions include Spotlight, Tate Britain, London, A-i-R at Universe 02, APC Laboratory, Paris, 2019, Converse Column, Public Art Commission, University of Leeds, SHE, Rodeo, London, 2020, Stillness & Motion, Episode 5, in conversation with Jennifer Higgie, Echolot podcast, Muzeum Susch, 2021, Minds Rising, Spirits Turning, 13th Gwangju Biennale.
Curated by Keith Whittle in partnership with the Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington.
