LILIANE LIJN - Gamma
A rare sugar lift aquatint etching on paper by the highly collected artist Liliane Lijn.
An abstract composition called Gamma in red and brown tones, from the Biting Through series 1977 published by Editions Alecto. Signed in pencil, denoted p/p for printers proof and titled with Greek letter Delta. The edition size was just 25.
Collections: British Council; Government Art Collection
Unframed on paper measuring 35 x 35 cm.
Printed on BFK Rives paper overall in great condition
Shipping rolled. Suited to combine with other loose sheets, £1uk £3 overseas combined postage charge,
Further details from the artist's website lilianlijn.com: The prints were made by the artist at Editions Alecto Studios in London and printed by Charles Newington and Loraine Smith at Tisiphone Etching Limited Published by Editions Alecto Ltd in an Edition of 25 with 5 Artist’s Proofs and first exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery, and at Editions Alecto, January 1977.
When there is something that can be contemplated, there is something that creates union. Hence there follows the hexagram of Biting Through.
Biting Through means union.
Biting Through means consuming. I Ching
These prints were based on innumerable drawings Lijn made in between 1974-6, in which she looked for and discovered dynamic patterns of flow. They were made by drawing identical marks on paper with attention given to the precise relationship between them.
Each mark was related to the preceding one as if they were links in a chain, the final image so dependent on this connecting relationship, that to erase one mark would lead to the erasure of them all because it would be almost impossible to find the point at which a small change in direction had led to the final image.
Drawing in this way is very much like weaving and also resembles cellular growth or the connections made between neurons in the brain.
Liliane Lijn is a 'New Yorker by birth, a European by education, and a Londoner by choice.' She is a leading pioneer and exponent of kinetic art and continues to experiment with light, movement, words, film, liquids and industrial materials.
In 1959, she travelled to Paris to study at the Sorbonne and the École du Louvre. She soon mixed in intellectual and artistic circles: from the Surrealists still gathered around André Breton, to the group of expatriate American writers and poets who lived in the Beat Hotel. Lijn's early works brought together these surrealist and existentialist influences in a series of extraordinarily detailed phantasmagorical drawings.
When she moved back to New York in 1961, Lijn was excited by space exploration and new technologies. She became the resident artist in a plastics factory where she was able to experiment with industrial plastics, fire and acids. She began using light, movement and liquids in her work and continued these creative investigations when she returned to Europe in 1963.
Since her arrival in London in 1966, her work has featured in numerous international exhibitions and is represented in public collections in Europe and the USA. Her work is represented in many public and corporate collections in Britain, including Tate; the British Museum; and the Arts Council of Great Britain. International collections holding her work include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Kunstmuseum, Berne; and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia.
Lijn's work featured in the Tate exhibitions A Summer of Love (2005) and This Was Tomorrow: Art and the '60s (2004).