BASEL.- The Japanese-Swiss artist Leiko Ikemura is internationally renowned today for fairy-tale-like scenarios populated by chimerical creatures and dream worlds in which female figures appear to fuse with landscape formations. Japanese audiences celebrate her as an artist who wholeheartedly embraced Western art only to grow aware of her cultural roots and eventually forged a singular synthesis of both cultures. The Kunstmuseum Basel now presents Leiko Ikemura. Toward New Seas, an exhibition in its new gallery building that offers a focused retrospective of drawings, paintings, and sculptures from all periods in the artist’s oeuvre. The show was designed in close consultation with Ikemura and in cooperation with the National Art Center, Tokyo, one of Japan’s five largest national art institutions. It is the first presentation to make use of the small courtyard on the new building’s basement level: the artist had a new cast of Usagi Kannon, a walk-in sculpture that rises to more than ten feet, made for the occasion.

Leiko Ikemura studied literature in Osaka and Spain before switching to painting and enrolling at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de Santa Isabel de Hungría in Seville in 1973. She subsequently lived in Zurich for several years; in the 1980s, she moved to Germany, where she still resides in Berlin and Cologne. Her early work from this period—powerfully expressive, but also enigmatic charcoal drawings and paintings in large formats that have received comparatively little attention—shows the influence of the “Neue Wilde.” In Switzerland, Ikemura in fact first caused a stir in the early 1980s with compositions in which aggression, violence, and the battle of the sexes are key themes.

A fusion of body and landscape, of two cultures
A watershed moment in the evolution of Ikemura’s early oeuvre came in 1983, when a stint as Nuremberg’s official artist-in-residence allowed her to focus entirely on drawing and painting for several months; soon after that, she became newly conscious of her Japanese roots. Her native country’s more recent history, religious culture, and rich literary heritage have been vital sources of inspiration in her work ever since. A stay in Grisons in 1989 led her to develop a novel visual vocabulary that yielded a fusion of body and landscape in the Alpine Indians series, followed by vaguely archaic hybrid creatures that the artist increasingly also rendered in sculptures.

In the 1990s, female figures appeared in Ikemura’s oeuvre that seem to hover weightlessly at the horizon between earth and heaven, past and future. Vulnerable and untouchable at once, the “girls,” which defy unequivocal characterization—their facial features and ages remain unspecific—have become a sort of trademark genre for the artist. Yet it would be a mistake to see these depictions as blandly inoffensive, troubled as they are by the presence of (self-)destructive and violent impulses.

Ikemura’s most recent work reflects her newfound interest in East Asian ink drawing. Human figures and nature blend into each other in oneiric or psychological landscapes. Specters come into view; mountains, rocks, and plants are animated by spiritual energies. Since the turn of the millennium, the conviction that humans undergo unceasing transformation no less than their environment has increasingly informed Ikemura’s art. The phenomena of emergent form and metamorphosis hark back to her early oeuvre, while also suggesting the artist’s growing concern for the future of our planet at a time when our natural habitat is increasingly under threat.

In addition to forty-seven works from the Kunstmuseum Basel’s collection, the exhibition includes around seventy pieces on loan from the artist herself as well as collections in Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, and Japan.