Description

‘Utterly gripping, enraging, entertaining – and important. I can’t recommend it highly enough’ Jennifer Higgie

In 1958, talented and fearless and eighteen years old, Liliane Lijn left her family home and moved to Paris alone to become an artist. Once there, she found an art world filled with the wild energy of creative revolution – peopled and controlled almost entirely by men.

Embracing the bohemian spirit of the Left Bank, Lijn built a life for herself in the city, befriending artists, poets and revolutionaries and creating ground-breaking sculptures with light, text and movement, despite being told again and again that there are no great women artists.

Liquid Reflections is her sparkling memoir of these years of experiment and adventure. Based on personal diaries from the time, this is a riveting and revelatory portrait of the artist as a young woman.

‘A whirlwind of encounters . . . a pioneer in melding art, poetry and science’ Art Basel

Publisher Review

With harrowing intimacy, Lijn’s account reveals her experiences in an era when sexism was the norm. Meeting William Burroughs, Man Ray, Meret Oppenheim, and so many others, Lijn cut a path across American, British, and European postwar art scenes, even while her search for self-driven meaning was continually thwarted by this masculine milieu * Los Angeles Review of Books * A beautifully written memoir by one of the most important and original artists working today. It’s not simply a record of the evolution of an artist, but a testament to the strength of spirit and imagination that allowed Lijn to develop her artwork in the face of structural sexism. I found her story utterly gripping, enraging, entertaining – and important. I can’t recommend it highly enough — Jennifer Higgie In the 1968 artwork that lends its name to American artist Liliane Lijn’s memoir, two acrylic balls chase each other in a mesmerizing dance atop a transparent disc covered in water droplets. That same sense of fluid motion infuses this autobiography, a whirlwind of encounters – with fellow creatives, men, and artworks – mostly set in late 1950s and 1960s Paris, with escapades in Athens, Geneva, and Venice. Lijn traces her artistic evolution and influences with a limpid diaristic prose, which lends a nonchalance to her life’s extraordinary events, from an enthralling but complex relationship with Greek artist Takis, to the relentless exploration of materials that made her a pioneer in melding art, poetry, and science * Art Basel * Liliane Lijn has been a unique and self-renewing force of creativity for six decades, amounting to an exceptional and unclassifiable career as a visual artist in many media, as well as a poet and a thinker — Marina Warner A revelatory account of a singular coming of age: a glittering portrait of the artist as a young woman * Interalia Magazine *