LEIKO IKEMURA

In-Between Worlds
Drawings, Paintings, Skulptures
September 14 to November 16, 2014

Leiko Ikemura, Comic Girl, 2007 (detail)

"The creative power comes from water, from the water and the sky. Nothing else."

Leiko Ikemura

In all her works, the artist mirrors the permanent process of getting closer and keeping distance. In her excessive body of work of drawings, paintings, and sculptures, she creates in-between worlds which are connected and cannot be separated. In a constant development between landscape and figure, up and down, object and abstraction she creates a pulsing and multifaceted organism. Beside close motific transitions especially her artistic technic prevents any form of delineation. In liquid watercolor as well as in soft pastel chalk Ikemura draws permeable landscapes and bodies. In printing she uses monotype, a form which, in contrast to the hard edge etching, does not allow hermetic silhouette. The same goes for Leiko Ikemura's painting in which tempera on jute grants a significantly different openness than say oil on canvas. And finally, it also goes for her first two videos which have not been presented to the public before. Following a flip-book principle they show in cross fades a series of drawings and emphasize the dynamical development from one motif to another in a uniquely narrative way.

The artists distinctly individual form of expression is repeatedly explained in her being coined by two different culture areas - Japan and Europe. This certainly finds its justification in the artist's biography. Leiko Ikemura was born in Tsu, in the Mie department of Japan, and studied Spanish Literature in Osaka. In 1972, she emigrated to Spain to continue her studies in Salamanca and Grenada. Alongside she began to work plastically at a sculptor's studio and eventually studied painting in Sevilla from 1973 to 1978. After spending some years in Switzerland, Ikemura moved to Cologne in 1985 and in 1991 she followed her call to Universität der Künste, Berlin University of the Arts.

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