Overview
Leiko Ikemura

It’s not about portraying any place. But we are part of the landscape, and we are landscape as well. Because when I’m really close to your face, I start to see mountains, and lakes. We can find landscape everywhere, and this inspires me. Also my memory inspires me, so when I start to make drawings, or make a certain movement, it can end up being a landscape. I like the rhythm of the landscape, it feels like waves. The earth undulates, always changing. It takes thousands of years, butt that's the way it is. It changes. That attracts me. I don’t paint objective mountains, or lakes. What I do is my act, because we have undulating rhythms in our selves. We are all cats, and landscapes, and girls.

- Leiko Ikemura, catalogue Motion of Love.
Born in Tsu, Mie Prefecture, Japan, and based in Berlin, Germany, Leiko Ikemura is an internationally renowned contemporary artist whose practice serves as a poetic bridge between Western and Eastern aesthetic traditions. Her work constitutes a profound investigation into the fluid boundaries of femininity, metamorphosis, and cultural identity. 
Through a multidisciplinary approach, Ikemura translates the inherent mystery and fragility of human existence into a visual language that is at once universal in its resonance and deeply personal in its execution.
 
A cornerstone of Ikemura’s artistic output is the ontological blurring of humankind and nature. This is not merely a thematic choice but a philosophical positioning: she rejects the traditional dichotomy between the figure and the environment. This synthesis is most vividly expressed through her iconic hybrid beings—figures that seem to emerge from the earth or dissolve into the clouds—and her "landscape-bodies," where the contours of the female form and the topography of the natural world become indistinguishable. In doing so, Ikemura invites the viewer into a liminal space where the spirit, the body, and the environment are inextricably linked, offering a timely reflection on our ecological and spiritual interconnectedness.
 
Since the beginning of her artistic career, Leiko Ikemura's work has been closely interwoven with her personal journey and the various stations in her life. Formative memories of her native Japan, alongside impressions gathered during her years in Spain and Switzerland in the 1970s and 1980s, remained central to Ikemura’s artistic development as she moved to Zurich in 1979 and later to Cologne in 1985 to pursue her career as an artist. The intimate metamorphosis of a lifelong painting process manifests itself in landscapes in which human figures and nature merge, amorphous forms and hybrid mythical creatures in continuous transformation.
 
The artist first caused a stir in the early 1980s with expressive and confrontational compositions that associated her with the Neue Wilde. She later rose to international renown with girlish figures unmoored from reality and cosmic landscapes populated by fabulous chimerical creatures. Japanese audiences celebrate her as an artist who wholeheartedly embraced Western art only to grow aware of her cultural roots and eventually forged a singular synthesis of both cultures.
 
 
Leiko Ikemura's works have been presented in solo and group exhibitions worldwide since the early 1980s, with notable solo and group exhibitions including: Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria (2026); Bündner Kunstmuseum, Chur, Switzerland (2025); Heredium Museum, Daejeon, South Korea (2024); Museo de Arte Zapopan, Guadalajara, Mexico (2023); Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin, Germany (2023); CAC La Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències Valencia, Spain (2022); Usagi in Wonderland at Sainsbury Center for Visual Arts, Norwich, UK (2021); Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland (2019); The National Art Center, Tokyo, Japan (2019); Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Germany (2013); Asian Art Museum, Berlin, Germany (2012) and The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan (2011).
 
Works by Leiko Ikemura are held in major institutional collections worldwide, including Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Albertina Art Museum, Vienna, Austria; Kunstmuseum Basel and Kunsthaus Zurich, Switzerland; Berlinische Galerie, Germany; Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, UK; Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, US; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo and National Museum of Art, Osaka in Japan.
Download Artist's Biography (PDF, opens in a new tab.)
View artist website
Selected works
  • Leiko Ikemura, Tata II (big), 2025
    Tata II (big), 2025
  • Leiko Ikemura, Blue Mom, 2023
    Blue Mom, 2023
  • Leiko Ikemura, Birds Mom, 2023
    Birds Mom, 2023
  • Leiko Ikemura, Mamadonna dance, 2023
    Mamadonna dance, 2023
  • Leiko Ikemura, Dello, 2023
    Dello, 2023
  • Leiko Ikemura, Pink Space, 2023
    Pink Space, 2023
  • Leiko Ikemura, Tiger Appears, 2022
    Tiger Appears, 2022
Selected exhibitions
Press
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