イケムラレイコ

Ikemura Leiko was born in Tsu, Mie Prefecture, Japan, and is currently based in Germany and exhibits worldwide. She works in a wide range of media including painting, sculpture, drawing, watercolor, printmaking, photography, and video, capturing diverse aspects of emergent and evolving images and elevating them into the realm of form without sacrificing their fertile potential and ambiguity. After studying Spanish at Osaka University of Foreign Studies (now Osaka University, School of Foreign Studies), Ikemura moved to Spain in 1973 and enrolled in the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Seville. In 1979, she moved to Switzerland and embarked on her career as an artist. After relocating to Cologne, Germany in 1985, she was active in both Cologne and Berlin for many years, but currently has a studio in Berlin. Ikemura first gained attention with drawings in the early 1980s. For Ikemura, drawings and watercolors are not mere preparations for completion of larger paintings but are works of art in their own right. In the vast number of drawings she produced during those years, Ikemura pursued the physicality and spontaneity of lines that directly convey motion, and became adept at intuitively apprehending her inner visions. Depicting images at times comical and pastoral, at other times brutal and terrifying, Ikemura’s drawings balance strength and delicacy and remain the origin and core of her practice (many of her early drawings are in the collection of the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland.) In the 1980s, Ikemura also made large oil paintings such as “Goddess of War” (1986, Collection Tanner Teufen) which convey the influence of Neo-Expressionism. Imagery relating to mythology, war, and other ominous subjects hints at the artist’s struggle with the medium of painting, and by the late 1980s this struggle had led her to the brink of a psychological crisis. She overcame this by working amid the tranquil environment of the majestic Swiss Alps in 1989. One painting from the “Alpen Indianer” series dating from this time, “Skier on Maloja Lake” (1990, collection of the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Aichi), was inspired not only by the natural beauty surrounding her but also by the Japanese landscape paintings of Sesshū Tōyō (1420–c. 1506). This work was the starting point of a landscape painting practice that has continued into recent times. Another milestone in the late 1980s was Ikemura’s engagement with clay, in which she explored imagery through amorphous lumps of clay and arrived at human and animal figures. Like drawing, soft and malleable clay proved to be an optimal medium for Ikemura’s improvisational and highly physical creative process. Eventually, sculpture became one of her central media alongside painting and drawing. Ikemura went on to produce ceramic and bronze sculptures as well, but these are always made from clay prototypes. In 1991, Ikemura became a professor at Berlin University of the Arts. Around this time, she prolifically produced double-image sculptures that synthesized organic elements such as flora and fauna and inorganic elements such as buildings, as well as drawings and watercolors of fantastical hybrid animal-plant beings. The iconic images of young girls that are perhaps Ikemura’s best-known works of the 1990s emerged shortly after these hybrid creatures. Devoid of distinct facial features, the girls are often set against indistinct backgrounds of black or another single color. They stand resolutely, lie down (as in “Reclining Girl”, 1997, collection of The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo), or appear to descend from the heavens. Despite their simple forms, the figures are embodied with complexity and ambivalence, conveying the awakening of consciousness in adolescence and a mix of anticipation and anxiety towards adulthood. Ikemura often paints on coarse jute fabric, and the rough texture of this material produces a soft-focus look that resonates with the innocent inner life associated with girlhood. The young girls in Ikemura’s two-dimensional works are always depicted with a horizon line. Regarding the horizontal compositions of paintings of reclining girls, Ikemura has cited art-historical influences in which the horizontal is combined with images of death, such as drawings by Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918) of his dying mistress, or Hans Holbein the Younger’s (1497/98–1543) “The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb” (1521/22, Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland). Ikemura has also depicted death directly in the form of reclining women’s corpses. Her series “Mement Mori” (2012–2013), the title of which is a Latin cautionary phrase meaning “remember that you must die,” comprises sculptures of decaying female figures. Here human death as part of the cycle of nature is expressed with simple horizontal forms and the color white, conveying a sense of new beginnings. The horizon line that divides the sky from the earth or sea is a significant recurring device in Ikemura’s work, not only in combination with the figures of young girls. For the artist, who grew up near the coast in Mie Prefecture, the sea is not only inextricably entwined with life—nurturing it, threatening it – but also symbolizes the eternal, transcending the everyday. In the 2000s, Ikemura produced various waterscapes with horizontal compositions, including those incorporating images of war. Though she was far away in Berlin, the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and subsequent accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station profoundly impacted Ikemura. The pair of monumental ceramic sculptures “Usagi Kannon” (Rabbit Madonna) (2012/14, collection of the artist), each more than three meters in height, are hybrids of Kannon, the Buddhist goddess of mercy revered in Japan and elsewhere in Asia, and a rabbit (“usagi” in Japanese). They emerged during the process of overcoming emotional turmoil caused by the unprecedented disaster, and were crafted with the help of many hands at Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park. Coated with a special glaze, the sculptures exude luminosity, and each has an interior void reminiscent of a womb. Ikemura’s sculptures often expose a hollow interior, intuitively conveying the inseparability of being and nothingness. However, the voids of “Usagi Kannon” are illuminated by countless holes in the body of the sculpture, allowing light like starlight to shine in and gently welcome visitors. In the 2010s, Ikemura began work on distinctive landscape paintings inspired by Hodler’s mountain landscapes as well as by the animistic worldview and ink wash paintings of East Asian culture, including “Green Scape” (2010, Museum Ludwig, Cologne). These gradually evolved into the huge paintings she calls “Cosmicscapes”. The series of mythic primeval landscapes “Genesis” (2014–2015), “Tokaido” (2015), and “Sinus Spring” (2018) represent a recent zenith of Ikemura’s career, and were memorably presented in triptych format. Ikemura has said that she spread canvases on the floor to paint these large-scale works, literally stepping into the paintings to create them. She immerses herself in the images and becomes one with them, capturing emerging visions and producing mystical landscapes in which people, animals, and the natural world coalesce and coexist as equals. She connects with the world through the process of painting, and by connecting with the world, she draws its abundant latent imagery into her own being. She has also worked with photography and video, and has carried out performance art. In 2022, she worked for the first time with inherently luminous and transparent glass to produce new versions of sculptures previously crafted in clay and bronze. This encounter with a new medium has expanded her expressive range even further. In closing, let us touch upon Ikemura’s relationship with language. As she moved from Japan to Spain, then Switzerland, and then Germany, Ikemura learned a series of new languages, and the experience of engaging with the world without words, like a small child before learning to speak, has profoundly influenced her artistic practice. Today Ikemura composes poetry in multiple languages, often presenting her poems at exhibition venues and in exhibition catalogues. However, the words are not explanations of the images, nor are the images visual replications of the words’ content. For Ikemura, navigating between visual art and language, as independent media that do not rely on one another, is one means of honing the refined sensibilities from which her imagery emerges. (Nagaya Mitsue / Translated by Christopher Stephens) (Published online: 2024-03-19)