Leiko Ikemura

Leiko Ikemura was born in Tsu, Japan, and lives and works between Berlin and Cologne.

She moved to Europe in 1973, where she studies art at the University of Seville. She lived for several years in Switzerland, where she developed her expressive drawings and large format paintings in the early 1980s, which became iconic in her work. You receive the "Stadtzeichnerin von Nürnberg" scholarship for artists in 1983 from Faber-Castell and the city of Nuremberg. In 1985 she the artist moved first to Cologne and then to Berlin, where she became a professor at the Universität der Künste in 1991.

In the mid-90s she became known for the figures of girls represented in her paintings, drawings and sculptures. In recent decades Leiko Ikemura has focused on landscapes, monumental and cosmic, which speak of change as a metaphysical principle and which draw on European cultural references but also of her native land, Japan. In her works of hers, among the different themes she deals with, she expresses her concern for our planet: human beings and nature merge, the head-shaped sculptures are hybrid creatures with a human face and small trees instead of ears.

The solo exhibition Leiko Ikemura: Usagi in Wonderland is currently underway at the Sainsbury Center in London, open until December 2021. A large retrospective was dedicated to her in 2019 at the National Art Center in Tokyo and the Kunstmuseum in Basel.

Some of her most important solo exhibitions are: Leiko Ikemura. Poetics of Form at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, 2016; Leiko Ikemura. All about Girls and Tigers, Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst in Cologne, 2015; Leiko Ikemura: Transfiguration, Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art, 2011. Her work has been exhibited in Europe, the United States, Asia and Australia.