Leiko Ikemura combines Asian and European traditions in her art. She creates a unique pictorial world that fascinates with its delicate, poetic elements as well as its intense expressiveness. In her cosmos of plants, animals, landscapes and depictions of the human face, hybrid beings and creatures refer to the world of Japanese fairy tales and legends. Classical European themes such as landscapes and portraits meet Japanese principles of suggestion, incompleteness and asymmetry.
The exhibition presents a cross-section of Leiko Ikemura's multifaceted oeuvre. 75 works of painting, graphic art, photography, video and sculpture span an arc from the 1980s to the present day. The exhibition presents Ikemura's unique thematic world not as a classic retrospective, but as a symphony of her central motifs. The works radiate a quiet strength that is both fragile and powerful. Ikemura's extraordinary oeuvre can thus be experienced in an exhibition that transcends the boundaries between the arts and opens up new perspectives on space, form and light.
Leiko Ikemura, Clouds, 2005 © Courtesy Leiko Ikemura and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024
At the same time, masterpieces of classical modernism from the collection of the Kunsthalle Emden will be shown in the exhibition rooms on the upper floor under the title EXPRESSIONISMUS. misunderstood, attacked, celebrated.
November 23, 2024 to May 11, 2025
