Len Lye: Energies

Len Lye was a visionary with a singular artistic intent — the transmission of energy, motion, and sound. His cross-disciplinary approach reveals an interest in all forms of energy: from the microbial metabolisms of early life on Earth, to the electric frequencies that careen between our cells — signalling to our hearts and instructing them to beat. He observed flows of nature and weather patterns, evoking cosmic rhythms and particles in space. In Lye’s practice, electricity, water, magnetism and the atmosphere became both artistic materials and sculptural collaborators.

Lye’s intuition for materiality and physics reveals the universal pulse that underpins all matter. Through the allure of experimental film arranged to music or choreographed sculptural forms, his ultimate medium was the relational exchange of energy and vibration between his ‘art that moves’ and audiences’ bodies. 
As one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most significant twentieth-century avant-garde artists, Lye knew his work would be ‘pretty good for the twenty-first century’. Relentlessly inventive, his ‘direct films’ of the 1930s place him as an ancestor of the music video, while his kinetic ‘tangible motion sculptures’ of the 1960s predate contemporary time-based media art approaches, such as programmed networked sculpture, video art, sound art, choreography and immersive installation. Spanning six decades, from the late 1920s until 1980, Len Lye: Energies is an exhibition of historical significance and contemporary relevance to new generations of audiences.

At the heart of the exhibition is Lye’s magnum opus, Trilogy (A Flip and Two Twisters) (1977) – his most exhilarating and cacophonous work: twelve metres of suspended sonic steel activated by electrical energy. Rarely seen paintings and batiks appear alongside kinetics and innovative camera-less films produced by scratching and painting directly onto celluloid. Selected materials from the Len Lye Foundation Archive include early ‘cave mind’ drawings, motion sketches, filmmaking stencils and tools, and speculative proposals that reveal a glimpse into the artist’s creative impulse.

Born in 1901, Len Lye was a maverick who defied art historical categorisation in the relentless pursuit of his vision. While he exhibited with the surrealists and associated with seminal composers and literary figures, he was committed to unlearning Western art history, often engaging with the visual and sonic practices of Māori, African and Te Moana nui-a-kiwa (Pacific) cultures. While he lived abroad for most of his career, in Sāmoa, Sydney, London and New York, his preoccupation with energetic forces was shaped by his early life in remote Aotearoa New Zealand, with its wild island coasts, cyclical tides and seismic–volcanic terrain.