Liliane Lijn
I AM SHE

I AM SHE is the most comprehensive show by Liliane Lijn outside the UK, featuring work from 1969 to the present day.

Over the past six decades, Liliane Lijn (American, lives and works in London) has created a strikingly diverse and visually arresting body of work. Lijn’s art is the direct visual, sensory, plastic outcome of her explorations and mining of inner and outer bodily phenomena, things huge and microscopic, inside and around us, difficult to nail down. What she wants is to get into and bring out such invisible forces; as much as her quest is solitary and personal, the works are not projections of the artist—or of anyone’s self.

"I don’t feel that I am necessarily an artisan but perhaps more an inventor. I think I can compare it to the difference between a research scientist and a technician. I am not terribly interested in making the object, but I have to, in order to see my invention.” (1)

In order to “see” her inventions, Lijn has experimented widely and wildly across mediums and materials, notably, incorporating machinery, light, and language in her work. Her North London studio is a place for speculation but also a site for testing, a research center, a lab.

On view in the main gallery, Linear Light Column (1969) is a rotating cylinder wound in enameled copper wire—once the main material used for telecommunication. On the walls are two large works on paper, Her Water Self and Inner Bird Portrait and the tryptic Transformation of the Bride in the Medusa (1987).

A selection of sculptural works created since the 1980’s is displayed on the podium. Two “Beaded Heads,” studies for a new a new kind of female head, and the “Torn Heads,” in which soft blown glass is combined with bronze, aluminum, feather dusters, and other materials. Later sculptural pieces like She Me Skin of the Tree (1999) and Nested Foot (2001) integrate discernible body parts—casts of the artist’s own body.

In the second room, Feathered Lady (1979) and Heshe (1980) are breathtaking in their formal and material appearances: 2-meter tall, these humanoid totems are ambiguously gendered through the use of feather dusters, piano wires, synthetic fibers. Both are topped by tank periscope prisms. Prisms are recurrent in Lijn’s oeuvre: they energize white light, splitting it into its spectral colors, making energy visible. Next, the exhibition premieres the most recent of Lijn’s inventions. In Catastrophic Encounters (2019-20), molten glass is poured onto a mica metal compound called Vapourshield, cratering its surface, bubbling like lava, becoming fossils.

Shrouded in half light, The Bride (1988) is a massive mixed-media performing sculpture that collapses myth, technology, industry, and nature. Enclosed in a black cage, this female archetype is a towering presence made of epoxy-bonded mica, ostrich feathers, blown glass, and lacquered papier-mâché balls. In darkness, she pulsates with light.

“The Bride is an erotic otherness already contaminated with the vapors of death. The Bride, like a rainbow, is a bridge between two states of being . . . The Bride is a caged being pulsating with repressed energy.”

Liliane Lijn was born in New York in 1939 to emigrés parents. She attended boarding school in Lugano and at 19 moved to Paris where she studied archeology at the Sorbonne and art history at the École du Louvre. In Paris, Lijn met the surrealist André Breton. Back in the States in 1961, Lijn lived in New York, where she first worked with plastics, experimenting with reflection, motion and light, and conducted her first research into invisibility at MIT. Upon her return to Paris, her interest in science and her friendships with Greek sculptor Takis, and Beat poets William Burroughs, Bryan Gysin and Nazli Nour inspired her early works with light and text: her first solo exhibition at the Librairie Anglaise in 1963 premiered the Poem Machines. Lijn lived with Takis in Athens between 1964-66. She moved to London in 1966.

Lijn has exhibited extensively. Among her last solo shows, “SHE,” Rodeo Gallery, London, 2019; “Spotlight,” Tate Britain, London 2018; and “Cosmic Dramas,” Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, in 2012.
Recent group shows include “On the Politics of Delicacy,” Capitain Petzel, Berlin 2020, “Sisterhood,” Haus N Athen, Athens; and “Still Undead: Popular Culture in Britain Beyond the Bauhaus,” Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, 2019.

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(1) Liliane Lijn in discussion with Vera Lindsey, Studio International, May 1969: 219

“I AM SHE” has received generous support from Nicoletta Fiorucci Russo, Emily King and Matthew Slotover.

Brian Butterworth and Liliane Lijn have known each other for at least twenty years, during which time they have had many discussions about art and science. From his point of view as a neuroscientist with a particular interests in whether the brain, human or otherwise, is inherently mathematical, Lijn’s work has always appeared to have an intuitive grasp of numbers and their relationships. Their discussion will revolve around Lijn's curiosity and interest in science, her work with language and the many aspects of seeing that depend on point of view, literally, or focus, also literally. Beginning in the 1970’s and developing through the 1980’s, Lijn’s work became more clearly focussed on the feminine. Brian Butterworth and Liliane Lijn will discuss how this could also relate to her interest in science and technology, seen primarily as male preserves.

Brian Butterworth FBA is emeritus professor of cognitive neuropsychology in the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. His research has ranged from speech errors and pauses short-term memory deficits dyslexia reading both in alphabetic scripts and Chinese and mathematics and dyscalculia. He is the author of The Mathematical Brain. He was Editor-in-Chief of Linguistics (1978–1983) and a founding editor of the journals Language and Cognitive Processes and Mathematical Cognition. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.