Announcing representation of Leiko Ikemura

17 July 2024

Lisson Gallery is pleased to announce representation of Leiko Ikemura (イケムラレイコ, 池村 玲子, Ikemura Reiko, born in Tsu, Mie Prefecture, Japan) across all its locations globally. The internationally active artist, based in Berlin, seamlessly shifts between luminous, otherworldly and often monumental oil paintings, introspective drawings and watercolours, glazed terracotta sculptures, glass and ceramics. Ikemura will present a solo exhibition for Lisson Gallery’s booth at Frieze London this October and has forthcoming solo exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Emden (2024), Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2024), and the Bündner Kunstmuseum, Chur, Switzerland (2025). Her first exhibition with Lisson Gallery will be at its New York location in Spring 2025.

Since the 1980s, with a focus on the female form, Ikemura has explored themes of transition, cross-culturalism, collective responsibility, and sexuality, emancipating the feminine body from its position in history and mainstream contemporary culture by challenging artistic conventions and disrupting social norms. “I think the female figure, as imagined by male artists, is frequently an idealised version of the female form and is always seductive in some way... The way females naturally accept being modelled by conventions and social norms does not interest me”, says Ikemura. Focusing on the transient innocence of childhood and the evolution from girlhood to womanhood, Ikemura’s female spirits are defiant and independent, yet fragile and ethereal, almost ghost-like, bestowing the spirits with a composite power to exist within multiple worlds, between our dreaming and waking states. Fusing Eastern and Western art – conceiving a realm inspired by East Asian sansuiga painting traditions, old Japanese masters, surrealism, post-war abstraction, and the revival of figurative painting in the 1980s – Ikemura’s spiritual works are imbued with a raw and tender presence that highlights the intimate relationship between human, animal, plant, mineral forms, and cosmology.

A central, recurring motif in Ikemura’s work is the ‘usagi’, Japanese for rabbit, which first appeared in her work following the Tōhoku earthquake and Fukushima nuclear accident of 2011 and the subsequent reported birth defects in animals. This mythical hybrid creature considered a messenger for the ‘kami’ (gods), integrates rabbit ears with a human face, personifying universal suffering, resilience and renewal while questioning cycles of creation and destruction that echo the artist’s concerns for the environment and threatened natural habitats. Having experienced multiple states of turbulence, from the 1975 death of Francisco Franco while living in Spain, to the rising pacifist movement in Switzerland in the 1980s, to the collapse of the Berlin Wall in Germany, and the remaining scars of the Pacific War in Japan, Ikemura maintains that hope and our capacity to love and prioritise peace is a core human responsibility. Her bronze sculpture, Usagi Kannon (Rabbit Bodhisattva of Mercy) has been presented at the Sainsbury Centre Sculpture Park since 2021 and at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park since 2020; the figure’s cone-shaped, hollow skirt – merging imagery of the Japanese Buddhist goddess of mercy, Kannon, Christian iconography of the Virgin of Mercy and people sheltering under the outspread cloak of the Virgin Mary – acts as a protective shrine, offering a place of refuge for all living things.

Leiko Ikemura studied at the Osaka University of Foreign Studies, Osaka from 1970–1972, followed by the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes de Santa Isabel de Hungría Seville, from 1973–1978. In 1979, Ikemura moved to Zurich to pursue a career as an artist. Her first solo exhibition in a public institution took place in 1983 at the Kunstverein in Bonn. That same year, she received the Stadtzeichnerin von Nurnberg, an artist residency facilitated by Faber-Castell and the City of Nuremberg. Ikemura later relocated to Germany, moving to Munich in 1984 and then to Cologne in 1986, where she developed an interest in sculpture and began experimenting with mediums such as ceramic and bronze. In 1991, Ikemura became a professor of painting at the Universität der Künste in Berlin. Since 2014, she has also held a professorship at the Joshibi University of Art and Design near Tokyo. She is the recipient of many prestigious awards, from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology in Japan (2019); the Cologne Fine Art Prize (2014); the August Macke Prize (2009); and the Association of German Critics (2001), among many others.

Ikemura has exhibited in numerous solo exhibitions internationally, including HEREDIUM in South Korea (2024), Georg Kolbe Museum Berlin (2023), Feuerle Collection, Berlin (2023), Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle, Netherlands (2023), Museo de Arte de Zapopan, Guadalajara, Mexico (2023), Being Art Museum, Shanghai (2023), Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Berlin (2022 & 2012), Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich (2021), CAC La Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències Valencia (2021), Stiftung St. Matthäus, Berlin (2020), The National Art Center, Tokyo (2019), Kunstmuseum Basel (2019 & 1987), and Nordiska Akvarellmuseet Skarhamn (2019).

Ikemura’s work has also been presented in group exhibitions, including at the Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden (2023); The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto (2022–23); 9th Beijing Biennale National Art Museum of China, Beijing (2022); Singer Laren Museum, Laren (2022); The National Art Center, Tokyo (2022); Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst, Cologne (2022); AMMA Foundation, Mexico City (2022); The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2022); Shandong Art Museum, Jinan (2022); Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, (2022); The Centre Pompidou, Paris (2021); ARTZUID 2021, Amsterdam Sculpture Biennial, Amsterdam (2021); Shiga Museum of Art, Otsu (2021); Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts Lausanne, (2021); Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Aichi (2021); Museum Folkwang, Essen (2021), National Museum of Ceramics, Leeuwarden (2020-21); and Oita Prefectural Art Museum, Oita (2020).

Ikemura’s work is held in the permanent collections of international institutions such as the Centre Pompidou Paris, the Albertina, Vienna, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Sainsbury Center Norwich, Herbert Gerisch-Stiftung, Neumünster, Kunstmuseum Basel, Kunstmuseum Bern, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, National Museum of Art Osaka, National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art Nagoya, Shiga Museum of Art Otsu, Toyota Municipal Art Museum, Mie Prefectural Art Museum Tsu City, and Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos.