Leiko Ikemura presents “FLOATING SPHERES” at Kunsthalle Emden (Germany)
Internationally renowned artist Leiko Ikemura (www.leiko.info) presents “Floating Spheres”, a solo exhibition that explores the artist’s enduring themes and visions through a set of 75 pieces spanning from the 1980s to the present day, showcased from 23 November 2024 to 11 May 2025 at Kunsthalle Emden, Germany (https://kunsthalle-emden.de/).
Curated by Lisa Felicitas Mattheis (Scientific Director of Kunsthalle Emden), with Ikemura’s approach in mind, “Floating Spheres” is not a conventional retrospective but a symphonic blend of her themes, offering a close view of her artistic evolution across media, including painting, drawing, photography, video, and sculpture, enriched by the exhibition design of Philipp von Matt Architects (https://phvm.com/). Along the path, art and architecture merge, transcending space and time to best present and physically embrace Ikemura’s imagination.
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 like Birdpeople II sculpture:
“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.”
Ikemura combines Asian and European art traditions and creates a unique visual world often leaning into the poetic and ephemeral. Classic European themes such as landscapes, portraits and still lifes meet Japanese pictorial principles in the form of allusion, incompleteness and asymmetry. Ikemura’s art, rich with mythological hybrids and fairy-tale creatures, as in Kopfuss and Big Boss drawings, brings to life an ancient world of legends that transcends time and culture:
“Devouring dreams, go on a journey, find your soul, give it colour to awaken gods.”
— claims the artist.
Inspired by ancient legends and personal memories, Ikemura evokes a quasi-meditative state, inviting viewers to explore their connections to nature as an extension of their own emotional landscapes.
Presented in the most northwest of Germany, at Kunsthalle Emden in East Frisia, Lower Saxony — renowned for its expressionist collection and its Louisiana Museum inspired architecture — “Floating Spheres” creates a dialogue between Ikemura’s work and that of the Nordic Romantic artists, who have deeply influenced her. Like Edvard Munch, the artist’s landscapes and portraits, like Lago with a Lying Figure and Lying in Yellow Dress, echo human emotions and inner states, sparking the conversation that explores themes of transformation and hidden connections between nature and humans, which lie at the core of her artistic vision.
Ikemura continues this legacy with solo exhibitions that immerse viewers in her unique world, beginning with Kunsthalle Emden and followed by upcoming worldwide exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (Japan, December 2024) and Bündner Kunstmuseum Chur (Switzerland, August 2025).
The artist will also open her first exhibition at Lisson Gallery in New York (USA, May 2025).
