Leiko Ikemura: Talk to the sky, seeking light – The Brooklyn Rail
11 July 2025
The Japanese-born, Berlin-based artist Leiko Ikemura has had a cult following in the United States since the early nineties. But while I saw a few pieces over the years, I did not fully grasp the visual breadth and emotional intensity of her vision until I came upon a survey of her work, Toward New Seas, at the Kunstmuseum Basel in 2019. Collectively, the semi abstract or quasi-figurative works on view there—sculptures in patinated bronze, glass, and ceramics, large-scale paintings with ethereal forms and spaces—suggested ghostly figures inhabiting otherworldly landscapes. The works conveyed a persistent narrative that was consistently spellbinding. Ikemura’s current exhibition at Lisson, Talk to the sky, seeking light, has a similarly potent overall effect, and among the eleven sculptures and fifteen recent paintings on view, certain individual works are even more arresting than those in the Basel show.
Equally adept at painting and sculpture, Ikemura combines the two in ways that create evocative tableaux. In Lisson’s main gallery space, for instance, the large bronze head Sleep (2010/2024), with a plush turquoise patina, rests on its side atop a white oval plinth situated near a corner. Hanging on the adjacent back wall, a series of three large-scale paintings (each approximately six by ten feet), show wispy mountain landscapes that recall Song Dynasty ink paintings or certain Japanese works of the Edo Period. In each of Ikemura’s landscapes, painted in tempera on coarse jute fabric, a head or a reclining figure quietly emerges from the misty environs as if seen in a mirage. With an easy leap of the imagination, the three painted compositions thus appear as hallucinatory dreamscapes that have been conjured into existence by the large bronze head nearby.
In some way, these vaporous landscapes underscore Ikemura’s fraught relationship with her Japanese heritage, which she explores only tangentially from afar, as an émigré now living in Germany. “I see myself as an outsider,” the artist has noted in press statements and in her writings, “Everywhere. I am simply a stranger.” In fact, the idiosyncratic sfumato technique she employs in her landscape and figure paintings, as well as her fantastical yet melancholy imagery, correspond more closely to Western Symbolist paintings by artists such as Odilon Redon or the work of Venezuelan eccentric Armando Reverón than to historical artworks from Japan.
Read the full review inThe Brooklyn Rail here.
