Lili Dujourie has managed to knock down the boundaries between genres and work with techniques as different as sculpture, photography, film, installation, collage, and drawing. Her line of thinking focuses on the themes of futility, loss, time’s lack of constancy, absence, and boredom. Her early works from the 1960s, very spare and rigorous, place her in the context of Minimal art and arte povera. In 1972, she produced Impérialisme américain, several versions of which exist. It is a sheet of steel whose visible side has been painted by the artist, propped against a red monochrome wall. As you get closer to it, you notice that the part of the wall against which the canvas is leaning has not been painted. With this work, Dujourie spoke out against the political and aesthetic hegemony of the United States in the 1970s, otherwise put, Minimalism, with regard to which she has always kept a critical distance, and about which she points to its incomplete reading, arguing that we only get a frontal and superficial view of it.

During the 1970s, with a series of black and white videos, without sound, showing her naked body in motion, she protested against the cult of woman as object and female aesthetics. The ensuing decades were marked by majestic and baroque installations using velvet, silk, broken mirrors, rich gilded frames, and marbles, often using trompe-l’oeil. She seeks the poetry emanating from the movements of materials and their reactions to the incidence of light.
Theatrical effects and staged presentations are condensed in her works. Like drawings nimbly and swiftly sketched, she has recently produced portraits in forms of mural sculptures made of wire (Joséphine, 2000). Her latest works, even more sober, are concave and convex pieces in terra cotta, with a bone-like or vegetal look, like fragments, placed on shelves, stands and metal tables (Sonates, 2007). With very spare means, Dujourie always creates a poetry steeped in abstraction.