Leiko Ikemura: Woman of Fire Dancing with Tree

The gallery presents a comprehensive solo show presenting new works by the Japanese-Swiss painter and sculptor.

Her works transport the variability of a constantly evolving body of work, in which also the unique qualities of the materials are seminally exploited as productive potential throughout the artistic process. The mystical environments and figures she creates are sensitive reflections of different cultures and religions, incorporating the things she has studied in literature or seen and experienced in various traditions.

The plethora of media in which the artist’s oeuvre expresses itself encompasses painting, sculpture and drawing as artistic genres. Its motifs, mainly centered on themes of embodiment and transformation, reflect both the artist’s formal autonomy as well as flexible dexterities and artistic skillset. In her fairytale scenarios, evocative of a dream-like sensibility and inhabited by hybrid creatures, cats, birds and girls merge while humanoid figures and landscape formations amalgamate, telling of metamorphosis and mutations. Her works present figurines that are turning into ghostly entities, manifestations of nature in its most intrinsic form, or trees revealing themselves as manifold variations of individual personalities.

The gallery showed the artist for the first time in 1987, in the gallery’s former exhibition space in Cologne, and is dedicating this solo show to a 30-year collaboration between the artist and the gallery.