"LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration", solo

Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Germany

09. 03. 2013 - 16. 06. 2013






|Leiko Ikemura. i-migration. Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Germany Photo: Ph. von Matt, Berlin



|Leiko Ikemura. i-migration. Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Germany Photo: Ph. von Matt, Berlin



|Leiko Ikemura. i-migration. Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Germany Photo: Ph. von Matt, Berlin



LEIKO IKEMURA " i - m i g r a t i o n "

Leiko Ike­mura is an in­ter­na­tion­ally ac­tive artist who has spent the last thirty years cre­at­ing an ex­ten­sive oeu­vre as a painter, sculp­tor, and draughtswoman. The Staatliche Kun­sthalle Karl­sruhe’s ex­hi­bi­tion ‘Leiko Ike­mura i-mi­gra­tion’ fea­tures some 140 art­works and places the spot­light on the Japan­ese-Swiss artist’s more re­cent work, which has been in­spired by con­tem­po­rary events.

Leiko Ike­mura found her style in the mid-1990s and has never looked back since, de­pict­ing name­less 
fig­ures shrouded in thought, ghost­like be­ings and un­earthly land­scapes, in which the line of the hori­zon acts as the thresh­old to in­fi­nite space. Ike­mura’s fig­ures in­habit an el­e­men­tary world of light and colour, land and sea. Shad­owy land­scape forms are con­strued as an­thro­po­mor­phic shapes, faces and rocks merge into hy­brid im­ages of na­ture. Ike­mura’s art con­sti­tutes an at­tempt to break down our ra­tio­nal 
con­straints and es­cape the scores of im­ages that surge in on us each day, leav­ing us to in­stead trust our in­tu­ition. As the artist says: “Eyes are du­bi­ous or­gans that shut them­selves off from the world with­out us notic­ing…” She thus chal­lenges us to shut our eyes and dive into the im­ages in­side us.

Born and raised in Japan, Ike­mura de­cided to move to Eu­rope as a young stu­dent, liv­ing first in Spain, then in Switzer­land, be­fore fi­nally set­tling in Ger­many. Her time is spent be­tween Cologne and Berlin. The par­tic­u­lar charm of Ike­mura’s art has often been ex­plained as aris­ing from the en­counter be­tween two cul­tures, from a sense of oth­er­ness, from a dif­fer­ent, non-West­ern and thus non-du­al­is­tic un­der­stand­ing of the in­di­vid­ual and space. The artist largely fore­goes de­pict­ing the in­di­vid­ual in the typ­i­cal West­ern man­ner as clearly sep­a­rate from his or her sur­round­ings. Her fig­ures are not fixed and wholly dis­tinct forms, they are not ex­pres­sions of some in­her­ent in­di­vid­u­al­ity. Un­der­pinned by a dif­fer­ent con­cept of the world, Ike­mura’s art points to a life be­fore the sep­a­ra­tion of sub­ject and ob­ject, and to an imag­i­nary place viewed in the sur­mount­ing of the sub­jec­tive-ob­jec­tive dichotomy.

The ex­hi­bi­tion cov­ers new ground in Ike­mura’s oeu­vre, by pre­sent­ing her pre­vi­ously un­seen wa­ter­colour se­ries ‘Artists Popes & Ter­ror­ists’ from 2008, her ‘Con­tem­po­rary Faces Mex­i­can’, as well as the Asuka 
se­ries, in­spired by war im­ages from 1941. In these more re­cent se­ries, Ike­mura draws from con­crete events and im­ages culled from the media and from art, adding a new and sur­pris­ing di­men­sion to her work.

Curator: Pia Müller-Tamm
Assistant: Sonja Maria Krämer
Exhibition design: Philipp von Matt

Catalogue:
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, released by Hatje Cantz, in cluding texts by Renate Berger, An­dreas Beyer, Sonja Maria Krämer, and Pia Müller-Tamm, priced €35.

Collector’s editions
Two editions have been produced for the show. The editions on paper are printed by Edition Copen­hagen, one of Europe’s leading lithographic workshops. The small-scale sculptural works will be produced as bronze casts ‘on demand’.


www.kunsthalle-karlsruhe.de/de/ausstellungen/ausstellungsrueckblick/ausstellungsrueckblick-2013/leiko-ikemura.html





|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe



|LEIKO IKEMURA. i-migration, Staatl. Kunsthalle Karlsruhe