Liliane Lijn: Stardust
Riflemaker, 79 Beak Street, London W1,
until 5 July
Liliane Lijn has always made ‘far-out’ sculpture, innovative, adventurous and aesthetically exhilarating. Her imagination fires on three cylinders: light, movement and the use of new and untried materials — untried, that’s to say, in art, though already in use for industrial or scientific purposes. Among her early works are the beautiful ‘Liquid Reflections’ (1967, now in the Tate), made of a hollow, revolving acrylic disc containing oil and water, over which roll two transparent plastic balls, and the ‘Poem Machines’ — cones inscribed with poems which, as the cones turn at different speeds, are transformed into purely visual patterns.
In the 1980s Lijn created the huge, weird ‘Woman of War’ and its companion ‘Lady of the Wild Things’, which exchanged laser beams, were activated by the sound of a recorded song and were made among other things of shiny black steel, the brightly coloured nylon brushes used by commercial car-wash machines, and prisms.
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