Leiko Ikemura. Paintings

The Japanese Swiss artist Leiko Ikemura (born 1951) first caused a stir in the early 1980s with expressive and confrontational paintings that associated her with the Neue Wilde. In the late 1980s Ikemura developed a novel visual vocabulary that ultimately led her to a fusion of body and landscape in the Alpine Indians. Then followed vaguely archaic hybrid creatures, which the artist increasingly also rendered in sculptures, and, in the 1990s, female figures hovering weightlessly at the horizon between earth and heaven, past and future, vulnerable and untouchable at once.

In her most recent works, Ikemura conveys the melancholy yearning for an indivisible union between humankind and nature in oneiric landscapes of the soul. The phenomena of emergent form and metamorphosis gesture back toward the artist’s early oeuvre.

Presenting drawings, paintings and sculptures, this book celebrates her career to date.