“Leiko Ikemura in dialogue with …

… Josef Beuys, Emil Nolde, Ludwig Kirchner, Bourgeois Louise, Max Ernst, Jean Fautrier and Paul Klee.”

Since Leiko Ikemura began her work as an artist in the 1970s, she has created an oeuvre unparalleled in terms of her approach to form, the awareness in her use of colour and especially her sensibility for material. This body of work comprises works on paper, painting and sculptures. The aim of her work is never one of pure representation, though depicting figures, objects, flora or fauna familiar to those of the viewer's reality. Ikemura's figuration is kept between object characters and illusion. She manages to show and hide at the same time. In her paintings she thinly applies oil or tempera on coarse, unprimed jute, allowing the paint to sink deep into the substrate and revealing it's structure. A similar effect can be seen in her watercolours, which let the paper's quality shine through. The figures of her sculptural works often seem as if just risen from some primeval matter. It becomes clear that all her art, rather than being executed after nature, transforms an idea about nature, or existence, in which one thing is just a fluent state of manifestation of a universal idea. A body can be a landscape and become a rock which is a head and floats over icy landscapes... Talking about her sculptures Ikemura once stated that she sees them as 'metaphors os permeability'. This may easily apply for her painterly work as well.

Born and raised in Japan, Ikemura has long since lived and worked in Europe and it has often been argued how her work derives from both: the cultural, p...

Since Leiko Ikemura began her work as an artist in the 1970s, she has created an oeuvre unparalleled in terms of her approach to form, the awareness in her use of colour and especially her sensibility for material. This body of work comprises works on paper, painting and sculptures. The aim of her work is never one of pure representation, though depicting figures, objects, flora or fauna familiar to those of the viewer's reality. Ikemura's figuration is kept between object characters and illusion. She manages to show and hide at the same time. In her paintings she thinly applies oil or tempera on coarse, unprimed jute, allowing the paint to sink deep into the substrate and revealing it's structure. A similar effect can be seen in her watercolours, which let the paper's quality shine through. The figures of her sculptural works often seem as if just risen from some primeval matter. It becomes clear that all her art, rather than being executed after nature, transforms an idea about nature, or existence, in which one thing is just a fluent state of manifestation of a universal idea. A body can be a landscape and become a rock which is a head and floats over icy landscapes... Talking about her sculptures Ikemura once stated that she sees them as 'metaphors os permeability'. This may easily apply for her painterly work as well.

Born and raised in Japan, Ikemura has long since lived and worked in Europe and it has often been argued how her work derives from both: the cultural, philosophical and religious traditions of her homeland as well as the full richness of the European art-historical heritage. Yet, whilst looking at her works, it quickly becomes apparent that these pieces express much more than the mere sophisticated interplay of cultural references. There is a mysterious air that pervades all of Ikemura's works. All is transitory. As if time and history, knowledge and imagination, nature and spirit had tied new bonds to loosely knit an alternate world of constant segues, these works become manifestations of an interim zone. It is by this that the artist challenges the beholder when undermining his traditional (Western) pattern of perception which establishes things, identifies them in the process of viewing and ties down their sense and significance. These works cannot be understood with an intellectual approach alone, but must be perceived on an emotional level. They dare us to see differently. They dare us to feel differently. An eventually they turn us into something else.

After living and working in different locations all over Europe since the 1970s, Leiko Ikemura currently divides her time between Cologne and Berlin. Just recently she was honoured with the retrospective exhibition 'Our Planet. Earth & Stars' at The National Art Center, Tokyo, in her homeland Japan to tremendous international acclaim. This exhibition will travel with a slightly altered presentation and the new title 'Nach Neuen Meeren (Toward New Seas)' to Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland, where it will run from May 11 through September 1, 2019.

For TEFAF NY Spring 2019 Beck & Eggeling presents works by Leiko Ikemura from the last twenty years, juxtaposing them with a selection of the gallery's prolific program. Rather than locating Ikemura's oeuvre in the art-historical context of her predecessors, the selection (made in close collaboration with the artist herself) aims to explore a similar artistic stance and feeling in work of artists such as Emil Nolde, Jean Fautrier, Max Ernst, Joseph Beuys or Louise Bourgeois, thus creating a real 'dialogue' in which the viewer is warmly invited to participate.

Leiko Ikemura, Joseph Beuys, Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Emil Nolde, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Jean Fautrier, Louise Bourgeois