Image: Len Lye, Sky Snakes, 1965 (2020 reconstruction). Steel ball chains, brass balls, electric motors, duration 10 mins. Len Lye Foundation Collection, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. Image: Bryan James
The Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and Len Lye Centre in New Plymouth will devote its whole building to “Len Lye: Energies”, which the gallery describes as the largest exhibition of the New Zealand-born artist’s work yet staged. Curated by Anna Briers and drawn from the Len Lye Foundation Collection, the show runs from 5 December 2026 to 26 April 2027.
The exhibition surveys about six decades of Lye’s experimental output, from the 1920s to 1980. It brings together 11 kinetic sculptures shown in motion, experimental films, early paintings and batiks, and seldom-exhibited archival drawings.
Its centrepiece is the return of “Trilogy (a flip and two twisters)” (1977), a 12-metre arrangement of spinning steel driven by electricity and accompanied by sound. The gallery calls it Lye’s largest and loudest kinetic work. Other moving sculptures on the gallery’s list include “Grass” (1961–65), “Universe” (1963–76, reconstructed in 1998), “Ribbon Snake” (1965, reconstructed in 2008) and “Zebra” (1965, reconstructed in 2009).
Lye’s films are also represented. “A Colour Box” (1935), a four-minute 35mm work originally made in Dufaycolor, and “Free Radicals” (1958, revised in 1979), a black-and-white 16mm film, both appear in the gallery’s presentation. Among the earlier works is the 1930 batik on silk “Pond People”, part of the foundation’s collection.
The gallery frames the show around Lye’s lifelong fascination with energy, an interest that, in its account, stretched from the earliest forms of life to particles in space and the electromagnetic waves around us. Although he spent most of his career abroad, living in Sāmoa, Sydney, London and New York, the gallery traces that interest back to his upbringing in remote Aotearoa New Zealand, with its exposed coastlines, shifting tides and volcanic, earthquake-prone landscape.
Lye himself summed up the theme by saying he was interested in “the business of energy” and in conveying a sense of what he called “zizz”.
