Leiko Ikemura – The influence of Western culture takes her abroad
Leiko Ikemura was born in Tsu, Mie Prefecture, Japan, on22 August 1951. During her childhood and youth in Japan, she developed a strong interest in Western culture, which eventually led her to study Spanish literature at the Foreign Language University in Osaka. In 1972, she went to Spain to further the knowledge she had gained, and she continued her studies at the universities of Granada and Salamanca. From 1973 to 1978, Ikemura studied painting at the art academy in Seville and then moved to Switzerland in the early 1980s. It was here that she was able to make her first artistic mark. While she had mainly focused on sculptural works during her studies, she was now successful in the field of drawing. Her work was particularly well received in Germany, where it was exhibited to great acclaim and ultimately led to her appointment as the Stadtzeichnerin’ (resident artist) of Nuremberg. She presented the works she created during this time in a highly acclaimed exhibition at the Kunsthalle Nürnberg.
Hazy female figures in select colour compositions
In 1983, Leiko Ikemura took part in the art exhibition aktuell '83 at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich. In 1985, she settled in Cologne, and soon became so deeply rooted in the art scene there that she was amongst the participants of the 1988 exhibition Made in Cologne alongside artists such as Hans-Peter Adamski, Michael Buthe, Markus Lüpertz, Sigmar Polke and Rosemarie Trockel. At times, she was considered to be one of the Neue Wilde artists, but Ikemura developed her own visual language, merging influences from the two cultures that shaped her into unique cosmic and spiritual landscapes, on the border between Far Eastern and Western art. In 1991, Ikemura was appointed to the University of the Arts in Berlin. In the mid-1990s, she discovered women as the central motif of her artistic work; she reduced her female figures to colourful silhouettes and used the painterly means of abstraction to break her figures down to their essential features, thereby achieving an intensity of expression that is characteristic of her.
Independent visual worlds between figuration and abstraction
Despite her success in Germany, Leiko Ikemura remained true to her home country of Japan, and in 2014, she accepted a call to Kanagawa-ku to take up a professorship at Joshibi University of Art and Design. Colour, reduction and blending are essential stylistic elements of the Japanese artist, who, in addition to her female figures, also offers up cosmic landscapes and hybrid creatures for her enraptured dream and soul landscapes. The boundaries between figure and environment are sometimes not clearly defined and become a completely new form. Leiko Ikemura has received prizes and awards for her work, including a scholarship from the Kiefer Hablitzel Foundation in 1981, the German Critics' Prize for Fine Art in 2001, the Iserlohn Art Prize in 2007, the August Macke Prize in 2008, the Cologne Fine Art Prize in 2014 and the Sparda Art Prize NRW in 2015.
Leiko Ikemura lives and works today in Berlin and Cologne.
Leiko Ikemura - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
