Sylvia Kouvali is delighted to present Seeds of Tomorrow, the fifth exhibition by Liliane Lijn with the gallery that runs concurrently with her major retrospective Arise Alive at Tate St. Ives, which has toured from Haus der Kunst, Munich, and mumok, Vienna.

The exhibition follows Lijn’s recent inclusion in notable group presentations such as Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet at Tate Modern and Radical Software: Women, Art and Computing 1960–1991 at Kunsthalle Wien. Lijn’s memoir Liquid Reflections was published in March by Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House.

Liliane Lijn (b. 1939, New York) is widely recognised as the first woman artist to work with kinetic text, beginning her pioneering experiments with light and movement as early as 1961. Born in the United States, she studied archaeology at the Sorbonne and Art History at the École du Louvre in Paris. Immersing herself in Parisian cultural life, she attended meetings of the Surrealist Group.

Lijn moved to London in 1966, initially to exhibit at the radical and influential Signals Gallery, founded by Guy Brett, David Medalla, and Paul Keeler, only to find the gallery had recently closed. Undeterred, she remained in London, building a six-decade career that spans painting, poetry, performance, sculpture, jewellery and installation. Lijn is recognised for her unique fusion of art, science, technology, Eastern philosophy, and feminine mythology, experimenting with a spectrum of materials such as bronze, steel, mica, feathers, plastics, prisms, copper and blown glass.

Seeds of Tomorrow brings together for the first time five paintings from a group of seven made in 1991. From the early 1980s, Lijn began searching for “a new image of the feminine,” producing drawings of female forms she would later title SHE. These works became central to both her painting and three-dimensional practice.

Created during a period of intense dreaming, Lijn’s paintings reflect her exploration of mythological and archetypal imagery, marking a shift from abstract fields of colour toward a more figurative expression. In these paintings, Lijn identifies the feminine with nature. Three works narrate the drama of the creative feminine. Lijn views these as a triptych, each image presenting the transformation from a joyous symbol of the life force in Lady of the Flowers to her sidelining and gradual erasure in Wrapped in Uncertainty and Stifling. She of the Mountain in the Sea emerges as mineral, air, water, and wind, whereas Seeds of Tomorrow depicts the archetype as an ominous vision of the future.

Presented alongside these paintings are two historical sculptural works from 1983 titled Lines of Power—the tallest examples of Lijn’s important minimalist kinetic sculptures exploring light and reflection. Recently shown at Tate Modern, the title for these works was inspired by a visit in the late 1970s to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where Lijn encountered rising serpents engraved on the columns of a reconstructed Egyptian temple. Familiar with the Uraeus—a rearing cobra symbolic of divine protection and the embodiment of several goddesses—Lijn interpreted the serpentine forms as symbols of cosmic energy, mirrored in the lines of light oscillating along her kinetic columns. Made from rolled perforated steel, Lijn indented these cylinders and wound them with copper wire using an experimental machine used by BICC (British Insulated Calendar Cables) and the Post Office in the development of the Waveguide project, a new and subsequently abandoned system of telecommunications to replace copper cabling in the late 1970’s.

Fusing the cosmic with mythology and technology, Lijn refers to these rotating cylindrical sculptures as “’lines of light.” As reflections oscillate up the columns, light acts as code, an entirely new way of seeing form. In an email dialogue with Guy Brett in 2001, she reflected on the connection between the circular and cylindrical forms in her sculptural work and the feminine body she was exploring through painting and drawing: “I want to create the energetic body, the flowing form. The light line on the cylinders appeared to me as a dance of form. That dance is, in a sense, the link between matter and energy. The serpentine, sibylline voice is the voice of the feminine.”