Leiko Ikemura: Dance of Color
In her yearslong artistic practice, Leiko Ikemura has created a complex, poetic, and internationally acclaimed œuvre. Her first solo exhibition at Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle—and her first in Munich in thirty years—introduces us to the artist’s visual worlds.
The glass and bronze sculptures as well as paintings from various work cycles on view in the exhibition offer a narrative journey through imaginary (pictorial) worlds. Ambiguous and multivalent, ever-changing, compressing and dispersing as well as creaturely, 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 exude an immanently immersive pull that allows viewers to plunge into the artist’s cosmos of sensory experiences.
In her yearslong artistic practice, Leiko Ikemura has created a complex, poetic, and internationally acclaimed œuvre. Her first solo exhibition at Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle—and her first in Munich in thirty years—introduces us to the artist’s visual worlds.
The glass and bronze sculptures as well as paintings from various work cycles on view in the exhibition offer a narrative journey through imaginary (pictorial) worlds. Ambiguous and multivalent, ever-changing, compressing and dispersing as well as creaturely, 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 exude 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 potentiated degree of abstraction. What remains is an instantaneousness of enormously radiant sensory and emotional power. Employing a determined painterly gesture that appears to dance across the canvas, the colors seem to pulsate on the substrate—and then contract and diffuse. In these works, imagination is elevated to a central stylistic device in a virtuoso manner.
The glass sculpture “Usagi with Wings” seems to bundle 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 (Blue)” are also expressions of a process of compression and simultaneous dissolution, ostensibly pointing, as organic hybrid beings, to the natural cyclicality as a fundamental principle of our perceptible universe.
Leiko Ikemura’s works have been subject to widely 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 (GER, 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 (GER, 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 (CH), Kunstmuseum Bern (CH), Kunsthaus Zürich (CH), Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Toyota (JP), The National Museum of Art in Osaka (JP), The Shiga Museum of Modern Art (JP), The National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo (JP), and Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein in Vaduz (LI).
