Lili Dujourie

Lili Dujourie’s artistic practice has continuously evolved since the late 1960s, exploring the relationships between image, material, and perception. References to art historical traditions, literature, and cultural memory appear as transformed fragments, embedded in the material rather than explicitly depicted. Starting with objects that responded to the depersonalized language of Minimal and Conceptual Art, her early work introduced questions of intimacy and subjectivity into strict formal vocabularies. This initial tension laid the foundation for a body of work that constantly transcends media-specific boundaries.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Dujourie engaged with photography and video, focusing on the temporal dynamics of these media – particularly the interplay of movement and stillness. The resulting works also explored questions of gender, identity, and representation. From the 1980s onwards, she increasingly returned to three-dimensional forms and developed a unique sculptural language based on the use of materials such as velvet, marble, plaster, and metal. These works continue and spatially develop the temporal and perceptual concerns of her earlier practice. Draped fabrics, veiled volumes, and fragmented structures orchestrate a negotiation between softness and rigidity, concealment and revelation. The motif of the fold becomes central – not as a purely formal gesture, but as a way of holding conflicting states together without resolving them.