IKEMURA, LEIKO
Tsu, Mie-Ken/Japan

Title: Light-Blue-Face.
Date: 2018.
Technique: Oil and tempera on jute.
Measurement: 100 x 80 cm.



Provenance:
- - Galerie Martina Kaiser, Cologne

- Private Collection Nord Rhein-Westfalen (aquired in 2018 from the previous owner)



- A spherical landscape characterised by intense yet delicate colours

- The work brings together the central themes of femininity and nature in Ikemura’s art

- The Albertina in Vienna is dedicating a comprehensive retrospective to the artist in 2025/26



Between Two Worlds

Leiko Ikemura grew up in Tsu, a coastal city in southern Japan. Her proximity to the sea left a lasting impression on her and became a recurring source of inspiration in her artistic practice. After studying Spanish literature in Japan and Spain, she turned to painting in 1973 and continued her studies until 1978 at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes in Seville. In 1979, she moved to Switzerland and, finally, to Germany in 1987, where she has remained based ever since. From 1990 to 2016, she taught as a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts and, since 2014, has additionally been affiliated with the Joshibi University of Art and Design in Kanagawa, Japan.

In her early artistic phase, Ikemura worked in close proximity to the Neue Wilde (“Young Wild Ones”), an expressive movement characterized by a radically gestural visual language. Yet she soon departed from this path in favor of a more poetic formal vocabulary. From the 1990s onward, she gained international recognition for her hovering, vulnerable female faces that oscillate between figuration and abstraction, which she refers to as Floating Faces. Her oeuvre combines Western artistic traditions—including landscape and portraiture—with principles of Japanese aesthetics: emptiness, ambiguity, and deliberate incompleteness. Out of this synthesis emerges a visual world that appears at once melancholic and dreamlike.



A Poetic Dream World

Light-Blue-Face (2018) transports the viewer into a dreamlike, nameless landscape. In the lower section of the painting lies a pale, almost white, beach-like plain, from which earthy ochre and violet-shimmering formations emerge along the bottom edge—forms that evoke rocks, rubble, or perhaps even a highly abstracted reclining human figure.

Dream worlds in which the boundaries between humans, animals, and nature dissolve are central to Ikemura’s oeuvre. For her, nature is a place of hope and energy, simultaneously poetic and mystical, of which humanity forms an inseparable part.

Across the middle of the composition stretches a horizon that avoids any sharply defined line, instead dissolving into gentle gradations of color. Warm earthy tones of mountain-like formations meet intense blues and turquoise hues dominating the upper half of the picture. The horizon functions as a metaphorical portal, mediating between the profane and a higher spiritual sphere.

In the upper right corner, the titular face gradually reveals itself. Ghostlike, scarcely more than a suggestion, a female visage emerges from the blue. Eyes, nose, and mouth are only faintly indicated, framed by strands of pale hair. It appears like an apparition on the verge of dissolving into the vastness of the sky.

The motif directly connects to Ikemura’s Floating Faces: not an individual portrait, but rather a symbol of emotion and femininity. Ikemura paints images that describe an inner world rather than external reality. Light-Blue-Face is not a specific place, but a spiritual space—a sensual and emotional experience.

Sophie Ballermann



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Third country: 159.66 Euro plus 30.34 Euro VAT

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#Leiko Ikemura #Figurative Painting #Japan #Post-War Art #Painting #Face #2010s #Post War.







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