In her yearslong artistic practice, Leiko Ikemura has created a complex, poetic, and internationally renowned œuvre. Her first solo exhibition at Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle—and her first in Munich in thirty years—introduces us to the artist’s visual world.
On view are glass and bronze sculptures as well as paintings from various work cycles. They invite visitors on a narrative journey through imaginary (visual) worlds. Ambiguities, constant change, consolidations and dispersals as well as essential, organic, and landscape-related elements seem to coalesce in amorphous configurations. The physical boundaries between image and experiential space are crossed—if not rendered obsolete. The works have an immanently immersive pull that allows viewers to plunge into the artist’s cosmos of sensory experiences.
The triptych "Sinus Woman" may be symbolic of a genesis. Abstracted landscape elements and omissions organically transform into amorphous color structures which, in turn, harbor mystical, anthropomorphic figures. "Red Light" lets the explorative moment of transcendence shine through its potential degree of abstraction. What remains is an instantaneousness of enormously radiant sensory and emotional power. Employing a resolute painterly gesture that appears to dance across the canvas, the artist makes the colors vibrate on the substrate—and then contract and diffuse. With great virtuosity, these works elevate the imagination to a crucial stylistic device.
The glass sculpture "Usagi with wings" seems to focus the light inside it, thus unfolding autonomously luminescent forces from within that give the hybrid figure its unique contour and shape. The bronze sculptures "Memento Mori" and "Lying" are also expressions of a process of condensation and simultaneous disintegration, ostensibly pointing, as organic hybrids, to natural cyclicity as a basic principle of our perceptible universe. Leiko Ikemura’s works have been included in acclaimed international exhibitions, currently at the Museum de Fundatie Zwolle (NL) and the Museo de Arte de Zapopan (MX)—prior to that, at Georg Kolbe Museum Berlin (DE, 2022), CAC La Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències in Valencia (ES, 2021/2022), the Sainsbury Center for Visual Arts in Norwich (UK, 2021), Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos (ES, 2020), Kunsthalle Rostock (DE, 2020), Kunstmuseum Basel (CH, 2019), Nordiska Akvarellmuseet in Skärhamn (SE, 2019), and The National Art Center, Tokyo (JP, 2019). Works of the artist can be found in several renowned collections such as those of Albertina in Vienna (AT), Centre Pompidou in Paris (FR), Collection Florence & Daniel Guerlain in Paris (FR), MAC’s Musée des Arts Contemporains in Grand-Hornu (BE), Bundeskunsthalle Bonn (DE), Kunstsammlung NRW in Düsseldorf (DE), Kunstmuseum Basel (CH), Aargauer Kunsthaus (DE), Kunstmuseum Bern (CH), Kunsthaus Zürich (CH), Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Toyota (JP), The National Museum of Art in Osaka (Japan), The Shiga Museum of Modern Art (Japan), The National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo (JP), and Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein in Vaduz (LI).
Tuesday - Friday from 11 am - 6 pm
Saturday from noon - 4 pm
Or by agreement
Source: Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Press Release
Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle
Amalienstraße 41
80799 Munich
tel. +49 (0)89-33 36 86
info@galerie-schoettle.de
http://www.galerie-schoettle.de/