Leiko Ikemura: Floating Spheres

Until May 11, 2025, the Kunsthalle Emden presents the internationally renowned artist Leiko Ikemura. The show brings together seventy-five pieces that provide a cross-section of her multifaceted creative output—from painting and graphic art, through photography and video, to sculpture. The works trace an arc from the 1980s to the present day. This exhibition is conceived not so much as a classic retrospective as rather a symphony of Ikemura’s themes and motifs, staged in an exhibition architecture by the renowned architect Philipp von Matt, Ikemura’s husband. Along the path, art and architecture merge, transcending space and time to best present and physically embrace Ikemura's imagination.

Since the 1980s, Leiko Ikemura, born in Tsu, Mie Prefecture, Japan, has cultivated a distinctive oeuvre. After studying literature in Japan and Spain and then graduating from the Seville Academy of Fine Arts (1973–78), she moved to Switzerland, only to later relocate to Germany, where she continues to live and work. Her early work was marked by radical imagery, drawing frequent comparisons to the neo-Expressionist Junge Wilde (Young Wild Ones) movement. Over time, she shifted towards a more delicate, poetic form of expression. Her art seamlessly blends Asian and European artistic traditions: classic European genres such as landscape and portrait intersect with Japanese pictorial elements including allusion, incompleteness, and asymmetry.

In her art, nature is never a foreign territory separate from man that must be conquered, discovered or explored, but a realm full of possibilities and a place of connection between different species that is sensed, rather than directly experienced. The artist brings together the natural and the human blurring the line between them, through transformative works:

“Transfiguration—I’ve seen it before, everything changes, people turn into rocks, into mountains, into oceans.” explains Leiko Ikemura. In masterpieces like Colonia and Girl with a Baby, motifs such as animals, plants, human figures, water, and distant horizons fuse to create what she describes as “a cosmos of possibilities.”

The many hybrid beings and creatures populating her work evoke Japanese myths and fairy tales, rendering the invisible visible. When asked which book is essential for a deeper understanding of her art, she responds unhesitatingly: In “Praise of Shadows“ by the Japanese writer Tanizaki Jun'ichirō. This celebrated 1933 essay explores Japanese aesthetics through subjective observations on topics such as light, material properties, and the warmth they convey, offering valuable insights for a critical reflection on Leiko Ikemura’s work.

This exhibition of the Kunsthalle Emden pays tribute to a great contemporary artist known for her exceptional ability to blend diverse cultures within her work. At the same time, Leiko Ikemura’s art addresses the major themes of our time, exploring the intricate relationship between humans and animals and human interaction with nature, and does so through a unique and original visual language. Rather than pushing an admonitory or moral message, her work offers imaginative alternatives to our fast-paced, consumer-driven world.

With Floating Spheres, Ikemura’s extraordinary creativity is turned into a tangible experience, which transcends the boundaries between the arts and opens up new perspectives onto space, shape, and light. The accompanying exhibition catalogue has been published by Hirmer Verlag. 

Curator: Lisa Felicitas Mattheis, scientific director

Special thanks to Niedersächsisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur, Stadt Emden, Freunde der Kunsthalle e.V., OLB-Stiftung, Stiftung Niedersachsen, EWE Stiftung and Leiko Ikemura