Centrifugal
Liliane Lijn and Annabelle Moreau
Royal Academy Schools Gallery, Hornsey
21st March – 11th May 2008
Curated by MOCA, London
Catalogue edited by Michael Petry with an essay by Jon Wood
‘Looking back over David Mellor’s 2005 book on Liliane Lijn’s work, he quotes her as stating in October 1965: “I see everything I am doing now is connected by the circle, cylinders, cones, discs: all are circular.” Lijn has an oeuvre marked by the constancy and returns of motifs and preoccupations – the sphere, the cylinder, the cone and the curvilinear, you might say – and these continue to this day. ‘Lines of Power’ (1983), made of two ten foot high revolving columns wound with plum red enamelled copper wire, turns with a flickering surface movement and ‘Liquid Reflections Revisited’ (2008) gives us four window-like framed screens, showing a random series of approximately 1,600 still photographs of her earlier ‘Liquid Reflections’ (1968). The close up photographs each fade in and out and create new planetary images in the cross-fading. Time seems to have been slowed down and an idea of cyclical endlessness without discernible patterns is compellingly articulated. Lijn’s words to me about them were characteristically clear and succinct: the arrangement presented “ a slow motion random juxtaposing of different visual moments to create a composite image that appears to evolve and transform without repetition”. Her work frequently invokes, as well as involves, the scientific and the hi-technological, with some far reaching ramifications entailed, as it has done since her early years as an artist. Seeing and thinking about her work, alongside Annabelle Moreau’s, however, reminded me that her work is also very much about the immediacy of the infinite, about seemingly distant things being very close to home and about the human body – both the body of the viewer and the body as presented in and through material – as both near and far.”
From Liliane Lijn and Annabelle Moreau by Jon Wood
Photographs courtesy MOCA, London
