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:

Anastasia Pavlou, Reader at Hot Wheels ★★☆☆☆

Anastasia Pavlou

Reader, Part 2; The Reader Reads Words in Sentences

★★☆☆☆

In this game of aesthetic cognition, the idea which survives is of the artist thinking.

Oh, the Storm at Rodeo ★☆☆☆☆

Oh, the Storm

★☆☆☆☆

This exhibitions is trying to explain the concept of ‘crazy paving’ to a blind man. It’s impossible to tell where a work ends and the wall begins.

Yo Nishimura: Dislocation at Sadie Coles ★☆☆☆☆

Yo Nishimura

Dislocation

★☆☆☆☆

Dislocation was once the stuff of excitement. Today, it barely recognises its own homelessness.

Li Yi-Fan: Screen Melancholy at Taiwanese pavilion in Venice ★★★☆☆

Li Yi-Fan

Screen Melancholy

★★★☆☆

Characters lose themselves in screens-within-screens.

Alvaro Barrington, Grandma’s Land at Sadie Coles ★★★☆☆

Alvaro Barrington

Grandma’s Land

★★★☆☆

The party slumps into a half-voiced political complaint and never recovers. This is what happens when instead of living culture, we ‘celebrate’ it.

Tamara Henderson, Green in the Grooves at Camden Art Centre ★★★★☆

Tamara Henderson

Green in the Grooves

★★★★☆

The whole thing feels like a remake of Wind in the Willows directed by a garden gnome.

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