Liliane Lijn enchants in the Vienna Museum of Modern Art

From a frontal point of view you can see a meandering river on the steps, words are arranged around it: “She”, “Flow” and “Light”. They are central terms for Lijn who come into play in their large retrospective.

Although the American created an incredibly diverse work in more than six decades, “Arise Alive” is her first major museum show. Three houses worked for this, the Mumok, the Munich House of Art and the Tate of St. Ives, where the exhibition will be shown from the end of May.

In the 1950s Lijn went to Paris to study archeology and art history. She had in artistic and literary circles, had close contacts with surrealists. She wanted to move poems in sound and soon also in motion. Rotating cylinders and rollers, on which Lijn sentences, words and letters deconstructed and put together again, are among the earliest work in the exhibition.

Her wish to become an artist solidified in the mid -1960s when she went to London, where she lives today.

Your installation “Shimmering” is set in motion in the Mumok staircase. A kind of skirt made of silver fabric hangs on the glass ceiling and turns rotating into a glistening vertebrae that is reminiscent of a dervish, but can also be associated with cosmic forces. Gravitation, star gloss and big bang are important reference points at Liliane Lijn. Under the early drawings of the show, the spiral -shaped drawing “The Beginning” from 1959 stands out, in which Lijn interweaves the outer and the inner (artistic) cosmos.

A darkened exhibition space is devoted to your works from the 1960s and 1970s, in which Lijn examines the visible and invisible properties of light. In wall objects, sculptures and experimental arrangements, Lijn used light and movement with the help of unusual materials such as plexiglass or polymer as a design tool.

It depends on the fleeting appearances, the light veils on the wall and the iridescent colors, which are experimentally generated by Lijn. The artist once said her work should breathe. “Your surface should be like a skin, translucent, permeable and the fine wet warmth of the lively radiate.”

From the end of the 1970s, Lijn’s art was decidedly feminist, with the artist particularly attached to mythologies of antiquity. Again and again she created cone -shaped objects, a reference to Hestia, the Greek goddess of the stove, the symbol of which was a conical pile of white ash. Letters, words or mathematical formulas appear on Lijn’s bowling, which often rotate around your own axis – such as Albert Einstein’s famous equation E = MC2.

The artist calls these works “Koans” – with which she alludes to the puzzles of eastern philosophy, which should help in meditation to empty the mind and concentrate.

Lijn’s large “Electric Bride” sculpture could come from today, but was created in 1989. The head of the “bride” consists of oral-blown glass with an integrated strobo light, the body from layers of a mineral called Mikanit.

Included is the “Electric Bride” in a metal cage with which it is connected to nine red glowing wires. In the background, the Japanese singer Shirai Takako whispered a poem about the myth of the Sumerian goddess Inanna and her descent into the underworld.

The cage sculpture is reminiscent of the uncanny work of Louise Bourgeois, the great pioneer of installation art, which was a generation older than Liliane Lijn. Between Bourgeois’ iconography and science fiction oscillates Lijn’s installation “conjunction of opposites: Lady of the Wild Things and Woman”, which was first shown at the Venice Biennale in 1986.

Two figures face themselves in a dark room – warriors, giant birds, combat machines, the figures cannot be classified. One of them agrees to speak, your counterpart reacts with light signals.

And last but not least, they interact with the works of Liliane Lijn, who give up puzzles, remain erratic, but spray with energy. “Arise Alive” is an electrifying exhibition.