Vibrant abstract paintings displayed on a white brick gallery wall, with two prominent copper-colored sculptures in a contemporary art exhibition setting.

Liliane Lijn

Seeds of Tomorrow

★★★☆☆

On until 22 November 2025

Lijn’s kinetic sculptures are prone to typecasting, except that their type depends entirely on content. Through Lijn’s long career, her trademark rotating cones and columns have borne text, abstract marks, and light projections; those have had little in common besides their spin. The two totems now doing their rounds spin yarns of enamelled wire. Elsewhere – in Tate’s Electric Dreams, say – they could have inducted currents to stop a pacemaker. Yet paired with Lijn’s abstract canvases, they turn easy to miss for the cobbled mews gallery’s architectural columns.

Which is to speak deliberately around the paintings, extracted from a series made in the early 1990s. If Lijn’s oils lack finesse, they far surpass the sculptures’ dynamism even as they are static. Are these dreams, floral fields, or psychedelic visions? No matter; how loudly they revolt against the cyclicality of their studio siblings! How spectacularly they burn!


notes and notices are short and curt exhibition reviews. Read more:

transfeminisms Chapter IV at Mimosa House ★☆☆☆☆

transfeminisms Chapter IV: Care and Kinship

★☆☆☆☆

Lack of care for the artefact is a strange USP for a gallery.

Justin Caguiat, Dreampop at Modern Art ★★★★☆

Justin Caguiat

Dreampop

★★★★☆

This is the sort of exhibition that makes a critic question the quality of their judgment.

Teewon Ahn and Ibrahim Meïté Sikely at Gianni Manhattan and P21 at Project Native Informant ★★★☆☆

Teewon Ahn and Ibrahim Meïté Sikely

★★★☆☆

These works are as garish as they are fun to look at.

Sibylle Ruppert, Frenzy of the Visible at Project Native Informant ★★★★☆

Sibylle Ruppert

Frenzy of the Visible

★★★★☆

This is the fodder of DeviantArt and the last year’s AI engines.

Alexis Kyle Mitchell: The Goal of Our Health at Peer ★★☆☆☆

Alexis Kyle Mitchell

The Goal of Our Health

★★☆☆☆

When Adam Curtis stopped narrating his ‘documentaries’, some stories are wasted breath.

The Imaginary Institution of India at Barbican ★★★★★

The Imaginary Institution of India

★★★★★

How does a curator tell an unfamiliar history yet evade the museum’ didacticism and the audience’s dulled expectations? Jhaveri’s ambitious review of India’s testing decades at the end of the 20th century could easily have been a torturous sermon: the…

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