Leiko Ikemura

Entitled Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice, the edition will be led by chief curator Prof. Dr. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung together with his conceptual team of co-curators Alya Sebti, Anna Roberta Goetz and Thiago de Paula Souza, as well as co-curator at large Keyna Eleison and strategy and communication advisor Henriette Gallus. The exhibition takes its cue from Afrobrazilian poet Conceição Evaristo’s enigmatic poem Da calma e do silêncio [Of calm and silence].

Leiko Ikemura’s work reflects the singular trajectory of a universal artist who, born in Mie province, Japan, has developed a poetic language shaped by the experience of displacement and a constant dialogue between cultures. Based in Europe since the 1970s, the artist studied at the Facultad de Bellas Artes at the Universidad de Sevilla and spent time in Switzerland and Germany, where she currently resides. This transnational experience allows her to escape both a rigidly Japanese identity and an automatic adherence to the canons of Western art. Her work outlines a field of its own, where echoes of Spanish Baroque painting and European Neo-Expressionism – such as the Junge Wilde movement – intertwine with foundations of Japanese aesthetic thought, including respect for matter and nature, an appreciation of gesture, and the acceptance of imperfection.

This movement between different referential systems becomes especially evident in the Girls series, where Ikemura dismantles both kawaii1 aesthetics and the traditional male gaze imposed on the female body. Her girls do not seek to please: they are diffuse, at times spectral figures, whose bodies and faces seem to emerge from a mist, carrying an unsettling delicacy and overflowing humanity. With large eyes and simplified features, these figures reveal inner fractures. Some conceal their eyes or mouths; others appear to be dissolving. For the artist, these zones of the body function as “wounds” that connect the self to the outside world. By distancing herself from a Japan-centered gaze, Ikemura is able to reposition the figure of the girl and return her as a subject, not an ideal. In this way, her work reveals the psychological complexity of the transition from childhood to adulthood, a period in which the body and identity undergo their most fragile and turbulent moments.

The same vital ambiguity runs through her more recent works, gathered here in a set of three paintings featuring green beings in different stages of mutation. These hybrid figures – part plant, part ancestral – question the human condition and evoke a deep interdependence with other living beings. In the artist’s own words, they “emerge from nature and from belief in the power of the ancestors,” pointing to a regenerative coexistence between worlds and species. Meanwhile, in the Red Scape and Sea Division drawing series, line and color act as records of a sensitive gesture that brings writing closer to landscape – an inheritance visible in both Japanese calligraphy and the practice of sumi-e. With rarefied lines and vibrant atmospheres, these images condense the tension between presence and disappearance. In Ikemura’s work, the elements of tradition are not formal quotations, but living forces that traverse an artistic practice in constant metamorphosis.