Leiko Ikemura — Karsten Greve Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 3 → October 22, 2011

Panorama 09/11 Un tour d'horizon à chaud des expositions parisiennes de septembre. Mis à jour chaque semaine.

The Karsten Greve Gallery presents an exhibition devoted to one of the most renowned Japanese artists of the international art scene. Leiko Ikemura was born in Tsu, Japan in 1951 and came to live in Europe in 1972, living and working in Germany. During her different residencies, Leiko Ikemura has acquired a sensibility that comes to her from an interior conflict between two different cultures.

This exhibition presents paintings, sculptures and different series of works on paper created between 2001 and 2011. She focuses her work on hybrid creatures in an atmospheric composition and a context that is open and permeable. The fusion and contrasts between human beings and the animal/vegetable world, simplicity and complexity and expansion and stability reflect her existential interest for transitional states and continuous change.

Following a period of expressive figuration, the artist turned to sculpture around 1984 to eventually reinvent her painting beginning around the mid 1990’s. In these new canvasses and watercolours, she concentrated on the human figure, principally on the representation of female characters such as ephemeral creatures in flaming light, or in a state of disappearance. Their transparent bodies, produced pictorially by colours stretched on canvas or untreated linen, express a constant and simultaneous development towards a past and a future by means of scattered contours.

After having finished her linguistic studies at the University of Osaka and spent seven years living in Spain where she studied art, she moved to Switzerland where she obtained citizenship. She has been living and working in Cologne and Berlin since 1985, teaching since 1991 at the Beaux-Arts in Berlin.

The internationally acclaimed work of Leiko Ikemura has been exhibited in prestigious museums around the world and is found in numerous private and public collections like The National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, the Linz Kunstmuseum in Austria, the Basel Kunstmuseum in Switzerland, the Museum Kunst Palast in Düsseldorf and the Kunstmuseum of Liechtenstein.