Liliane Lijn: Arise Alive
Tate St Ives, St Ives
May 24 – November 02, 2025

This summer, Tate St Ives presents Arise Alive, a major exhibition of the work of Liliane Lijn. Surveying Lijn’s career over six decades, this expansive survey features key works by an artist whose wide-ranging practice includes sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, collage, video and performance. Lijn, one of the first women artists to create kinetic works, explores the intersection of art, poetry and science, combining surrealism, mythology, philosophy, scientific innovation and feminism. Organised by Haus der Kunst in Munich and mumok in Vienna, in collaboration with Tate St Ives, Arise Alive is the most comprehensive survey of the artist’s work to date.

The exhibition explores three key themes that span Lijn’s career: kinetic art initially through motorisation and optical effects; light and energy giving visible form to immaterial and invisible forces; and feminism and the body challenging dominant ideas of the feminine in art and technology. Lijn encountered surrealism while in Paris in the late 1950s, where the movement’s focus on the unconscious influenced her emerging practice. The exhibition begins with early works on paper such as Sky Scrolls (1959-61), in which Lijn combines her interest in Chinese horizontal scroll paintings and her love of the pure vastness of the sky to produce cloud worlds inhabited by fantastical flying creatures.

In Athens, in the 1960s, Lijn began her investigations into the effects of light and the transfer of energy. Works such as Fire Lines (1960), made with molten plastic, sparked a period of experimentation with polymers and other synthetic materials. In Drillings and Cuttings, Lijn uses the transparency of Perspex blocks to reverse space, whereas Echolights (1963) and Cosmic Flares (1965-6) are explorations of the connections between cosmic optics and those possible in a work of art, as well as creating a visual metaphor for the particle-wave paradox. These led to the creation of a seminal work, Liquid Reflections (1966–8), in which a hollow acrylic disc filled with water rotates on a platform, using spin and gravity to create a luminous dance of two translucent spheres across its surface.

Lijn’s lifelong quest to find a path to female spiritual power, explore the flow of energy and the essence of life has created a body of work to date that is formally varied and fundamentally rooted in urgent questioning of light and energy, the material and immaterial.

more. www.tate.org.uk