Leiko Ikemura at Kunsthalle Emden

Floating Spheres

Nov 23, 2024 - May 11, 2025

Kunsthalle Emden
Emden, Germany

This show brings together seventy-five pieces that provide a cross-section of Leiko Ikemura's multifaceted creative output—from painting and graphic art, through photography and video, to sculpture. The works trace an arc from the 1980s to the present day. This exhibition is conceived not so much as a classic retrospective as, rather, as a symphony of Ikemura’s themes and motifs, staged in an exhibition architecture by the renowned architect Philipp von Matt, Ikemura’s husband.

Since the Eighties, the Japanese-Swiss artist Leiko Ikemura has created an unmistakable oeuvre. Whereas her early works were characterized by radical expression, she later committed to a more tender, poetic pictorial language. She opens up to onlookers a fascinating cosmos, consisting of plants, animals, landscapes, and portrayals of the human countenance. Ikemura combines Asian and European art traditions and creates a unique pictorial world. Classic European motifs such as landscapes, portraits, and still lifes meet with Japanese visual principles of allusion, incompleteness, and asymmetry. Hermaphrodites and creatures make reference to the myths and fairy tales of Japan and lend a visible form to the invisible.

With Floating Spheres, Ikemura’s extraordinary creativity is turned into a tangible experience, which transcends the boundaries between the arts and opens up new perspectives onto space, shape, and light.