Leiko Ikemura

Behind an inconspicuous façade, we enter a Gesamtkunstwerk that Leiko Ikemura has created together with her architect husband, Philipp von Matt. The architecture is striking! While the entrance area convincingly oscillates, in perfectly detailed style, between modern representation and sleek modesty, Leiko ́s studio is composed into a sequence of large and voluminous spaces that radiate quietness and appear to be inspired by Japanese...

Behind an inconspicuous façade, we enter a Gesamtkunstwerk that Leiko Ikemura has created together with her architect husband, Philipp von Matt. The architecture is striking! While the entrance area convincingly oscillates, in perfectly detailed style, between modern representation and sleek modesty, Leiko ́s studio is composed into a sequence of large and voluminous spaces that radiate quietness and appear to be inspired by Japanese architecture.
Japan is one of her four homelands, beside Spain, Switzerland and Germany. In Germany, she lives and works in Berlin and Cologne, where she has another house and studio space.

Leiko Ikemura moved to Berlin in 1991, when she became a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts. Since then, Professor Leiko Ikemura has shaped numerous brilliant students.

In the 1980s Leiko Ikemura, was counted as one of the “Neue Wilde” and exhibited in a solo show at the Maenz Gallery in Cologne, between shows by Walther Dahn and Georg Jiri Dokoupil. Two years later she moved to Karsten Greve Gallery with branches in Cologne, Paris, Milano and St.Moritz.

Leiko Ikemura usually works on several of her large paintings simultaneously. She uses pigments and oil colour, sometimes both on the same painting. The Japanese garden, central to her studio space, also seems to be entering her work. Unifications with Caspar David Friedrich’s world take place at the same time.

Leiko also does photography and sculpture. Her lying figures are quite unique, because they are about living people and not dead or sleeping ones, like so often in art history. The ceramic sculptures are often models for bronze sculptures. Most persuasive are also her watercolour paintings. She makes portraits in this technique, sometimes using photographs as a reference, but often painted from memory.

Leiko Ikemura lives and works in an exceptional world. She is far apart from all art fashions, most successful, extremely diligent, unobtrusive, refined and at the same time, tough and convincing.

To see more of Leiko Ikemuras work, please visit her website www.leiko.info