"The Spaces Between" Ikemura & Foerg

Langen Foundation, Neuss, Germany

24. 06. 2007 - 11. 11. 2007


The exhibition is the second presentation of works by two artists from Japanese and Western cultures at the Langen Foundation. The Japanese artist, Leiko Ikemura, and the German artist, Günther Förg, are contemporaries in several respects. They were both born at the beginning of the 1950s and grew up in a period marked by a striving to get over the trauma of the world war.
The cultural differences — the far Eastern and the central European — are only nuances within the international context of the exuberant mood of this curious and extremely mobile post-war generation which wanted to have an impact on a changing world.

For Ikemura and Förg, black seems duplicitous and ambiguous and thus creates space. Whereas Leiko Ikemura's tender figures seem to submerge in a black sea, Günther Förg creates seemingly architectonic spaces with a surface clarity. Both worlds of images share an expansive vista that is held fast by a horizon. Space becomes graspable in Ikemura through the figure which populates it, and in Förg through the articulation into geometrizing components. The mysterious and the ordering character, the void and being — in the transition, the essential hallmark of each articulation of space is opened up. In this transition, the quality of the 'in between' is the central factor in the works shown in the exhibition. Dissolution and condensation, concentration and sparingness, space and time, prove themselves to be not opposites, but complements.

Curator: Chrysanthi Kotrouzinis

Author Text & more information: Langen Foundation
A catalogue about this exhibition was published by the LANGEN FOUNDATION: