"Liliane Lijn: Light and Memory"
2002-06-29 until 2002-09-12
Rocca – Centre for Contemporary Art
Umbertide, PG, IT Italy

Promoted and organised by the Municipality of Umbertide, sponsored by the Region of Umbria, and the Province of Perugia. Liliane Lijn: Light and Memory will have its official opening on Saturday 29th of June 2002 at 6 pm at the Rocca – Centre for Contemporary Art in Umbertide, Perugia. One of the pioneers of the transformation of scientific thought into Art, Liliane Lijn traverses the regions of light, sound, movement, performance, text, video and object.

Her explorations have taken myriad different forms, from the early light sculptures and Poem Machines of the 1960s to artists' books such as Crossing Map (1983), her performing Goddesses (exhibited at the 1986 Venice Biennale), large-scale public sculptures, such as the controversial Earth Sea Light Koan (1997) on the Isle of Wight and the intimacy and power of her recent work.

The exhibition presents Liliane Lijn’s recent work with neon, fire and video. The body of recent work will also be seen in the context of seminal works from her kinetic period.

‘Liliane Lijn is one of the most consistent sculptors working in England today. Consistent in the originality and inventiveness of her art; consistent in the intellectual challenge her work poses to the onlooker and consistent in the technical mastery she demonstrates in every project. Her work delights and surprises us, the range of her creativity is awesome yet her work is never daunting. A truly formidable artist.’ Dame Elizabeth Esteve-Coll, Former Director Victoria & Albert Museum

Liliane Lijn works are in numerous international collections: Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Modern in London, Art Institute of Chicago, Biblioteque Nationale, Paris, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Museum of New South Wales,Sydney.

There publication accompanying the exhibition ( printed in both Italian and English ) will published and distributed by Thames & Hudson. It contains critical texts by English art critic and curator Guy Brett, Hilary Spurling, author of The Unknown Matisse, and the Italian art critics and curators Lara-Vinca Masini, author of Arte Contemporaneo and Enrico Mascelloni, curator of La Rocca. It will contain 126 colour and black and white reproductions of the artist’s works and bio-bibliographical references.

In the catalogue, Hilary Spurling writes:

The technology is modern but the materials – fire and bronze – go back to the ancient world. Like much of Lijn’s work, Lilith and her companions can be read on many levels as a dialogue between contemporary and classical form, between decay and growth, death and rebirth, constraint and liberation. In these extraordinary inventions, Lijn has found a way to look frankly and directly at the female body. She has reclaimed the imagery of a male-imprinted tradition by evolving the kind of language Woolf proposed nearly a century ago: a plastic language of great visual inventiveness, emotional power and allusive range with which to explore what it means to be, think, and feel as a woman at the start of the twenty-first century.

IMAGE
Liliane Lijn
Divided Self
2001 28 x 38 x 38 cm
patinated bronze, cast glass, argon, mirrored perspex box
     

Related Links:

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Other Important Exhibitions in Italy