After moving to Spain and beginning to study art there in the 1970s, Leiko Ikemura launched her career as a contemporary artist in Switzerland before permanently relocating to Germany in the early ’80s.
Using a wide range of media including painting, sculpture, drawing, watercolor painting, printmaking, photography, and video, Ikemura depicts various aspects of creation and change of various entities in the world as well as the latent potential for these things. Ikemura’s singularly ambiguous vision – exemplified by her depictions of young girls, visionary figures, fantastic hybrid creatures, people and animals integrated into a landscape – easily assumes different forms from one image to the next. Her work conveys the unyielding notion that as living beings we should strive to accept the diverse existence of all things exactly as we find them. It is precisely the modest and introspective quality of Ikemura’s art that makes it such an incisive critique of today’s more and more stifling society.
After some 40 years of artistic quests, Ikemura has recently turned to large paintings to manifest primordial narratives on a mythic scale. In this exhibition, made up of approximately 230 works in 16 installations, we hope to share the overarching vision and worldview that Ikemura has realized in the past and continues to explore in the present.
Source: The National Art Center, Tokyo
Article: The Poetic Visions of Leiko Ikemura, at the National Art Center, Tokyo
Kokuritsu-Shin-Bijutsukan
The National Art Center, Tokyo
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Japan
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