The works of Liliane Lijn have been included in many major group exhibitions such as the Tate’s Art of the Sixties and the Hayward Gallery/MACBA’s Force Fields. Identified as part of ‘an alternative sixties art’, her peripheral place in histories of modernism ignores her groundbreaking early work, which explored new possibilities for drawing, sculpture and performance. Many of the ideas she addressed, particularly art for a new, post-war utopia, are now being explored by a younger generation of artists and curators.

This book accompanies the first major retrospective exhibition of her work and concentrates on the development of Lijn’s work from the 1960s and 70s. It is also an account of this era – the evolving technocracy of France and the United States, the development of the space race and the impetus for mass-produced, democratic art. The illustrations feature not only Lijn’s early surrealist drawings, kinetic sculptures and light works but contemporary photographs that document and illuminate this era.