Liliane Lijn was born to Russian Jewish parents, in New York, USA in 1939. Arriving in the USA before the outbreak of the Second World War, her family returned to Europe in 1953 and she studied in Lugano, Switzerland before moving to Paris to study Archeology and History of Art, afterwards deciding to pursue an artistic career. Starting with her <em>Poem Machines</em>, inspired by Surrealist automatism, Lijn, who has resided in London since 1966, has become a pioneer of kinetic art, investigating sound, light, motion and material properties to create her unique sculptures and installations.
Kinetic art pioneer Liliane Lijn was born to Russian Jewish parents who had recently left Nazi Germany and settled in New York, on 22 December 1939. The family moved back to Europe when Lijn was 14 and she attended grammar school in Lugano, Switzerland. Aged 18, she moved to Paris, where she studied archeology at the Sorbonne and art history at the École du Louvre, afterwards deciding to become an artist. While in Paris Lijn took part in meetings of the Surrealist group, where she met the French writer, poet and theorist André Breton. She started experimenting with movement and poetry in the 1960s, incorporating writings in her contemplative kinetic sculptures, in part inspired by Surrealist automatic writing. In 1963 she first exhibited her Poem Machines, cylinders with printed words that spun at high speed until they blurred and vibrated, at the Echo-Lights and Vibrographes exhibition at Librarie Anglaise, Paris. In the early 1960s Lijn also spent time in New York, where she frequented the world of the Beat poets and first worked with plastics, experimenting with reflection, motion and light. Later the same year Lijn married the Greek artist Takis (Panayiotis Vassilakis), with whom she had a son and spent time in Greece until their separation in 1966, after which she settled in London.
Around the same time Lijn started making cone-shaped kinetic sculptures, Koans (one example, White Koan (1972), is on permanent display at the University of Warwick, Coventry). The word 'Koan' was taken from Zen Buddhism and referred to a puzzling, often paradoxical statement or story used as an aid to meditation and a means of gaining spiritual awakening. The conic shape also referred to the Greek hearth goddess Hestia's iconic symbol, a mound of white ash, highlighting Lijn's interest in 'feminist mythography which countered patriarchy' (Mellor 2005, p. 43). In 1974 Lijn staged the performance The Power Game, a text-based socio-political game for the Festival for Chilean Liberation at the Royal College of Art. In 1975 she completed her first 16mm film, What Is The Sound Of One Hand Clapping?. While Lijn's early works were primarily concerned with light and text, in 1979 she began to make large-scale totemic-like sculptures of goddesses, symbolising female energy and power. In 1986, as part of the 42nd Venice Biennale, she exhibited the computer-controlled drama entitled Conjunction of Opposites consisting of two such sculptures, Lady of the Wild Things (1983) and Woman of War (1986). Later she used bronze casts of her own body parts for sculptures, putting them together like a puzzle (like in Lilith, 2001]). She later recalled: '[...] it made me [...] realise how I'd always felt that my body did not really fit, and that my head and body were separate, and the problems of this separation, particularly for a woman' (Studio International Interview, 2014).
During 1983–90 Lijn was a member of the Council of Management of the Byam Shaw Art School in London. In 2005 she received an Honorary Doctor of Letters Degree from the University of Warwick and an ACE International Artist Fellowship, a residency at the Space Sciences Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, in partnership with NASA and the Leonardo Network. From 2005–9 Lijn developed, in collaboration with astronomer John Vallerga, Solar Hills, a large-scale solar installation in the landscape. The further outcomes of Lijn's NASA residency were Stardust Ruins, installations using aerogel, a synthetic porous ultralight material derived from a gel, used, among other things, by NASA to collect stardust in space, and video projections. In 2019, Lijn was commissioned by the University of Leeds to produce Converse Column, a nine-metre-high kinetic text work. Lijn has exhibited prolifically since the 1970s, including, most recently, at Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre (2003), England & Co. Gallery, London (2006), Sir John Soane's Museum, London (2011), Tate Britain (2018) and Rodeo Gallery, London (2019). Three glass and bronze sculptures by Lijn from Tate's collection from the Torn Heads series (late 1980s–early 1990s) were included in the 2020 Walk Through British Art: Sixty Years display at Tate Britain. Lijn's work is represented in multiple UK public collections, including Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate, British Museum and Arts Council. Lijn is represented by Rodeo Gallery, London. She currently lives and works in London. In 2023 her work featured in If not now when: Generations of women in sculpture in Britain 1960-2022, at the Hepworth Wakefield.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Liliane Lijn]
Publications related to [Liliane Lijn] in the Ben Uri Library