London, November 22nd, 2024
Liliane Lijn in conversation with Maddalena Iodice
The life and work of artist Liliane Lijn (b. 1939 in New York) are informed by movement, a rhythmic and constant one. A motion that propagates in circular spheres, just like the swirl of her artworks, just like the spheric plenitude that characterises the feminine as described by philosopher Lou von Salomé. Working at the intersection of visual art, poetry and science for over six decades, Liliane Lijn’s category-defying work reveals a connection with Surrealist ideas, kinetic art, ancient mythologies, feminist, scientific, and linguistic frameworks.
Born in 1939, Liliane grew up in New York before relocating to Switzerland with her parents as a teenager. At the age of eighteen, she firmly declared she was going to become an artist and move to Paris. It was 1958. Her artistic research was nurtured by a vibrant cultural moment and the cosmopolitanism of the Parisian avant-garde, yet Liliane soon realised the struggle of carving out a space for herself as an artist in an environment heavily ruled by men, where only a few women were visibly operating, often embodying masculine roles. The process of finding her own voice as an artist and as a woman, took Liliane on a journey animated by the energy of creative revolution, during which she never receded from pushing her practice in an increasingly experimental direction. The quest for the self and the power of the unconscious articulated through the early drawing, became a fascination for the invisible and primordial forces of the cosmos. Where the pioneering approach to materialities, like Perspex, plexiglass and copper wire, allowed her to delve into the poetic qualities of science; the encounter of art, technological assemblage and performative intervention privileged her discourse around the female body. Her later works express the urge to read ancient archetypes anew, offering a counterpoint for patriarchal narratives.
Liliane’s work challenges categorisation, and the urge to align to any art movement, instead what moves her is the impulse to make, to follow her own motion and dive deep into the substance of existence. Her work is currently seeing a long overdue resurgence with a survey show travelling from Haus der Kunst München, to mumok, and Tate St Ives in May 2025.
I met Liliane at her North London studio shortly after the opening of her exhibition at mumok in Vienna. Our conversation provides a glimpse into her dense life and groundbreaking artistic career, offering anecdotes and insights that Liliane further elaborates upon in her forthcoming memoir Liquid Reflections.
Liliane Lijn. Arise Alive at mumok in Vienna has just opened. How was the process of working on such a comprehensive survey of your work?
LL The process was very interesting, although I’ve had other large exhibitions, I’ve never had an exhibition quite like this. There are two important museums behind, Haus der Kunst and mumok, whose respective curators, Emma Enderby and Manuela Ammer came to visit me a few times. They looked at the work I had out in the studio but also through my archive, at drawers of drawings, at paintings… And then they started making choices. It was very funny because at first, I thought, well, this isn’t really a retrospective because they didn’t select work from the 90s, for example. However, their intention was to do a survey, not a retrospective. In other words, looking at my work through their eyes over a long period of time. At first, I was a little bit disappointed about that, I have to admit, but then when we actually put up the show, I realised how much work was there!
Do you think the show puts the accent on some specific aspects of your work more than others or tries to offer a new framework to read it?
LL Well, every curator will have their own reading of an artist’s work. Every person has their own, right? I think the show is driven by Woman of War and the Lady of the Wild Things, which is the first piece of work Manuela came across back in 2019 at Basel Art Fair Unlimited. It is where it all started. She was very curious to understand that work, we met over dinner and talked the whole evening. In a sense the show looks at the path that led towards those sculptures.
“All animals, all mammals, all reptiles, anything that’s alive is always thinking, pray, predator, pray, predator. So you’re always on the lookout for movement, because movement can either be something you’re going to eat or something will eat you. It’s primal. I think people are fascinated by anything that moves and that is the great fascination of kinetic art.”
Let’s go back to the very beginning of this path then. Why art? What is it that called you about the artistic environment and made you leave Switzerland for Paris back in 1958?
LL What made me become an artist? Well basically, I met an old school friend, Nina Thoeren. We had known each other since we were about 11 years old, and she was living in Venice with her mother who was a Surrealist painter. We were both interested in making art. I had started making art in a small way, you know, in Lugano with other students. Her mother Manina was going to Paris because she’d married Alain Jouffroy, who was quite a well-known French poet, about 20 years younger than she was. Nina and I decided that we were going to meet in Paris. So, of course, it was rather difficult to do that, because my parents were not happy. I was only 18. We agreed I would have studied Archeology at the Sorbonne because my father was very adamant that I had to go to university. I couldn’t just become an artist.
Your artistic research developed in a vibrant cultural moment. You were exposed to Surrealism, the Beat Generation poets… I am particularly interested in the influence of Surrealist practices in your work and your experimentation with automatic drawing. I am thinking about artworks like Two Worlds, 1959 and The Beginning, 1959.
LL Automatic drawing was very liberating. I remember going to a couple of artists’ workshops where we were encouraged to draw with music and sort of feel rhythm connecting it to the gesture of drawing. Practicing yoga, delving into Buddhism and philosophy was also something that very much nurtured that phase. I read very widely and then I started becoming interested in science. But that took a while. It wasn’t right away. At the beginning, I spent time drawing, because I thought I wanted to be a painter, and I realised that you can’t paint if you can’t draw. Two Worlds I must have drawn the winter of 1959. When I look at it now, I think of the triangle as clear, empty mind, and the circle full of the chaotic emotions that I felt at the time. So it was, in a sense, an idea that I had of a path, which was to be… It was very important for me, because it also articulated what I felt as a woman. For women to take the power of their mind, to connect to their own spiritual power, was crucial, especially at the time. Women couldn’t become priests, very rarely would a woman become enlightened. You hardly ever heard of a Zen monk that was female…
Would you say that finding your artistic voice came with this moment of self-affirmation as a woman?
LL Yes, I think it did. The Beginning which I painted the same year, was also a very important work for me. I felt that I was drawing my own cosmos, if you like, and it gave me a sense of my own structure. It marks the beginning of my own work.
What was the process cultivating your work in an environment heavily populated by men where only a few women were visibly operating?
LL It was very difficult. For example, the well-known women working with sculpture were considered to have very male energy as if they were incorporating some other role. Like Louise Nevelson. That first year in Paris for me was extremely intense. It was towards summer that I started painting. One of the paintings I did was inspired by a vision I had when out one evening at sunset. I saw this extraordinary cloud formation that looked to me as if it was a gigantic goddess in the sky… Behind all the clouds there was a chaotic presence of creatures or monsters. I drew it up, and then I painted it. Unfortunately, I only have a very bad slide now. The painting was lost when I lived in Greece.
I’d like to jump to 1962 and further talk about Poem Machines and the role of post-structuralist poetry.
LL I was influenced by a lot of poetry. I mean, there was poetry all around me and I wrote extensively. I wrote a lot… To begin with, I was interested in light and at some point, I started doing these long drawings I called, Skyscrolls, which were partially influenced by a visit to the Cernuschi Museum where I saw a show of horizontal Chinese paintings. So, I was painting these scrolls, when around 1960 I decided to go to New York. I had been living with Takis, a Greek sculptor who had developed work with magnetism. I was very fascinated by what he was doing, which led me towards an interest in science. Anyway, I needed to be on my own, so I went to New York where I developed works informed by research on light and space and experimentation with liquid polymers, molten plastic and Perspex sheets. Once back in Paris I became interested in the science of optics and light, and the work of Augustin-Jean Fresnel, a great French scientist who worked on light interference. Inspired by one of his experiments I made something I called Le Vibrographe. It consisted of two revolving cylinders on which I had made lines. Both cylinders had exactly the same pattern but when they revolved, they started creating interference. At that point, I realised that I might as well use words, which are lines themselves. First, I tried using the alphabet until a friend of mine, Nazli Nour who was an English poet, saw what I was doing and asked me to use her poems instead. That is how I began to make the Poem Machines. They were rotating metal drums; they rotated quite fast so the words were dissolved into energetic patterns that I felt related to sound.
Read the full interview on Muse February Issue 65.
Courtesy Liliane Lijn. Digital collage by Tommy Camerno. Original photograph by Massimo Finizio.
Courtesy Liliane Lijn. Digital collage by Tommy Camerno. Original photography by Sergii Figurnyi.
