“New Artist Spotlight” is a recurring editorial series featuring artists who have recently joined the rosters of Artsy’s gallery partners.
Throughout her decades-long career, Japanese Swiss artist Leiko Ikemura has painted hazy portraits of feminine figures. Along with the oil painting for which she is best known, Ikemura has also worked in video and, frequently, sculpture, using glass, metal, and ceramics to capture human and animal figures as amorphous, ghost-like entities.
Living and working in Berlin, Ikemura recently joined the roster at Lisson Gallery, which will stage a solo exhibition of the artist in New York in spring 2025. She will also be featured at Lisson’s Frieze London booth this October. This show, and her recent representation, usher in a significant year for the artist, whose work has been long overlooked in the United States. Meanwhile, on the global stage, Ikemura will be the subject of several solo exhibitions: at the Kunsthalle Emden in November 2024, the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo in 2024, and the Bündner Kunstmuseum in Chur, Switzerland, in 2025.
Born in Tsu, Japan, Ikemura graduated with a degree in Spanish from Osaka University in 1972. Shortly after, she moved to Spain, where she would study art at the Academia de Bellas Artes in Granada and Seville from 1973 to 1978, eventually moving to Zurich in 1979. By 1983, she had held her first institutional solo exhibition at Bonn Kunstverein in Germany. She would subsequently move to Berlin, where she became a professor of painting at the Berlin University of the Arts in 1991.
Ikemura balances Western and Eastern influences in her paintings and sculptures, drawing from East Asian sansuiga traditions, surrealism, and post-war abstraction. The subjects of her paintings most often include images of young girls and various anthropomorphic animals, such as a rabbit or cat, typically rendered in ethereal landscapes created with light, quick brush strokes. Occasionally, the artist deviates from figurative themes in favor of vast dreamlike landscapes, like her recent painting of an erupting volcano, Paisajes Con El Monte Fuji 11 (2015).
Ikemura’s work sometimes features the usagi (“rabbit”) motif, which she particularly began to focus on following the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011, following reports of a rise in birth defects in animals. For instance, Usagi Kannon (Rabbit Bodhisattva of Mercy) (2011), a bronze sculpture of a female figure with rabbit ears, draws on traditional depictions of the Japanese Buddhist goddess of mercy, Kannon, and the Christian motif of the Virgin Mary. First exhibited at Sainsbury Centre Sculpture Park in Norwich, England, the sculpture features an entryway that people can stand underneath, enveloped by the protective figure.
Though Ikemura’s recognition in the U.S. is long overdue, the artist is renowned across Europe and Asia. Her recent solo institutional exhibitions have been held at HEREDIUM in South Korea (2024) and Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin (2023). Her solo gallery shows have been presented by KÖNIG GALERIE in Seoul, Galerie Peter Kilchmann in Paris, and Fergus McCaffrey in New York.
