Leiko Ikemura: Momstars

It was during the 1980s that Leiko Ikemura, who was born in 1951 in Tsu, Japan, first caused quite a stir with her expressive and confrontational imagery within the context of the Neue Wilde. She has since become internationally renowned for her girlish figures unmoored from reality and cosmic landscapes filled with fabulous chimerical creatures, as presented in shows at the Kunstmuseum Basel and the National Art Center in Tokyo. In Japan, she is celebrated as an artist who has...
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It was during the 1980s that Leiko Ikemura, who was born in 1951 in Tsu, Japan, first caused quite a stir with her expressive and confrontational imagery within the context of the Neue Wilde. She has since become internationally renowned for her girlish figures unmoored from reality and cosmic landscapes filled with fabulous chimerical creatures, as presented in shows at the Kunstmuseum Basel and the National Art Center in Tokyo. In Japan, she is celebrated as an artist who has consistently immersed herself in Western art only to become increasingly aware of her cultural origins and thus arrive at a unique synthesis of both cultures. She is exhibiting works from all her creative periods up to her most recent sculptures on both floors at CFA Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin. Leiko Ikemura initially studied literature in Osaka and Spain, before enrolling in painting at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes in Seville around 1973. She then lived in Zurich, and moved to Cologne in the 1980s; since the fall of the Berlin Wall, she has also lived in Berlin, where she has held a professorship in painting at the Universitä t der Kü nste since 1991. In her article, Anaë l Pigeat writes that the artist still lives, much like the cat within her, in a place where history is palpable on the street, on the exterior skin of the walls and in the behavior of passers-by. In a malleable city in perpetual transition, whose present-day geographies have nothing in common with those at the time of her arrival there. A city where politics is visible on the streets, just like in her work: from the one form to the other.