Developed in cooperation with Haus der Kunst in Munich, this survey exhibition of the work of Liliane Lijn is the most comprehensive institutional solo presentation of the artist thus far. Born in New York in 1939 and based in London since 1966, Lijn has been working at the interface of visual art, literature, and science for more than six decades and has created an extensive oeuvre that includes sculptures, installations, collages, paintings, videos, and performances.

Lijn's multimedia practice has its origins in the kinetic art of the late 1950s as well as in her exploration of Surrealist ideas, ancient mythology, and eastern philosophy. Even her earliest works reveal an interest in unconventional artistic materials—an interest that continues to this day. In 1961, Lijn made first works from Perspex, in which she experiments with reflection, movement, and light. "Electric lights flash on and off plexiglass constructions, creating a tangle of transparent shadows called Echo Lights by the artist," writes the American poet John Ashbery in 1963 about her exhibition in Paris. "Her Vibrographs are wheels revolving too fast for you to read the words printed on them, but perhaps they affect you unconsciously like subliminal advertising."

From the very beginning, Lijn saw technology and science as allies in her excursions into realms beyond the visible. She also understood this as a feminist project. The dematerialization of language and body, their translation into vibration or sound, to the artist meant an attack on patriarchal structures as well as the reduction of the woman to her body. "I was interested in dematerialization—in the idea of losing the body. And that was related in a way to being a woman." In search of new formats and forms of expression, Lijn started working on a science-fiction prose text in the second half of the 1960s—a partially autobiographical linguistic work of art that she published in 1983 under the title Crossing Map. It tells the story of an artist's spiritual journey of overcoming her material body.

Lijn also broke new ground in the field of visual art in the 1980s. Focusing her attention on the human form, she began reflecting on the impact of technology on the body. She created futuristic female “deities,” part machine, part animal, and part plant, using feather dusters, synthetic fibers, optical prisms, and lasers. In these iconic sculptures, which mark the epicenter of this exhibition, Lijn relates the cosmic to the personal, technology to mythology, and the profane to high-tech, giving female archetypes a contemporary form. Subsumed under the term "cosmic dramas," these works are the departure point for the exhibition's major stages in Lijn's genre- bending oeuvre spanning from the 1950s to the present day.

Liliane Lijn was born in New York in 1939 and has been working internationally since the 1960s. Her works are included in collections like the Tate Modern, the British Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London as well as the Musée de la Ville de Paris and Kunstmuseum Bern.

Solo and group exhibitions (selection): Siren, (some poetics), Amant Foundation, New York (2023); Concrete Experience, Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (2023); The Milk of Dreams, 59th International Art Exhibition of the Biennale di Venezia (2022); I AM SHE, Ordet, Milan (2020); Action <-> Reaction: 100 Years of Kinetic Art, Kunsthal Rotterdam (2018–2019); Spotlight: Liliane Lijn, Tate Britain (2017–2018); Cosmic Dramas, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Middlesbrough (2012–2013); Liliane Lijn: Works 1959–80, Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry (2005); Beyond Light: Liliane Lijn and Bill Culbert, Serpentine Gallery, London (1976–1977); Liliane Lijn: Echolights and Vibrographs, Galerie de la Librairie Anglaise, Paris (1963)

Curated by Manuela Ammer

The artist, at all times an outsider, is as a woman an outsider even among artists. She follows the path of her senses with little or no acceptance of predetermined moulds. Being herself means entering into the skin of everything else, not limiting or closing herself off to what she thinks she is. Subject to cyclical change, she becomes her own subject. She is a filter, a mirror, a prism, an energy coil. She is subject and object, active and passive. She finds herself the meeting point of opposites. --Liliane Lijn, London, 1982