Len Lye: Energies

Len Lye is considered one of Aotearoa’s most significant twentieth-century artists. An effervescent and original thinker, his cross-disciplinary approach reveals an interest in energy in all its forms—from the microbial metabolisms of early life on Earth to the quantum entanglements of particles in space, and the ocean of electromagnetic waves surrounding us.

Spanning six decades of experimental practice, from the 1920s to 1980, Lye’s artistic legacy can be experienced by audiences as a relational exchange of energy between art objects and bodies. Through the allure of movement and with electricity as a collaborator, his works reveal a universal pulse that underpins all matter held in a state of constant vibration.

Occupying the entirety of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and Len Lye Centre, Len Lye: Energies will be the largest exhibition of the artist’s work to date. Scheduled as the 2026–27 summer blockbuster, the show augurs the highly anticipated return of Lye’s most exhilarating work, Trilogy (a flip and two twisters) (1977)—a cacophony of electrical energy and choreographed steel that is widely considered his magnum opus.

Len Lye: Energies presents selected works from the Len Lye Foundation archive including early motion sketches, animation plans, and speculative concept drawings. Paintings and batiks are shown alongside kinetic ‘tangible motion’ sculptures, as well as camera-less films rendered through the direct application of scratches and paint onto celluloid.

While Lye lived abroad for most of his career as an expatriate artist 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.