Leiko ikemura bio

Leiko Ikemura(イケムラレイコ, Ikemura Reiko, born 22 August in Tsu, Mie Prefecture, Japan) is a Japanese-Swiss artist who works in a variety of mediums, including oil painting, sculpture, and watercolor. She divides her time between Cologne and Berlin, teaching painting at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. Active on the international art scene since the s, she is known for her work within the Neo-Expressionism movement of the s, as well as her continually evolving style. Much of her oeuvre features elements of symbolism, involving the creation of magical universes blend elements of her animals, humans, and plants. Her work has been featured in a number of solo exhibitions in Japan and Europe, and is held in the permanent collections of major institutions such at the Centre Pompidou, Kunstmuseum Basel, Kunstmuseum Bern, Kunsthaus Zurich, and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. In , she had her first solo exhibition in Mexico at the Museo de Arte de Zapopan.

Biography

Leiko Ikemura studied at Osaka University from to , majoring in Spanish. She then left Japan to study in Spain from to at the Academia de Bellas Artes in Granada and Seville. In , Ikemura moved to Zurich to pursue a career as an artist. Her first solo exhibition in a public institution took place in at the "Bonn Kunstverein", in Bonn, Germany. That same year, she received the Stadterichnerin von Nurnberg, an artist residency facilitated by Faber-Castell and the City of Nuremberg.

A year later, the artist relocated to Germany, moving to Munich in and then Cologne in , where she developed an interest in sculpture and began experimenting with mediums such as bron

Japanese-Swiss painter and sculptor (born )

Leiko Ikemura (イケムラレイコ, Ikemura Reiko, born 22 August in Tsu, Mie Prefecture, Japan) is a Japanese-Swiss artist who works in a variety of mediums, including oil painting, sculpture, and watercolor. She divides her time between Cologne and Berlin, teaching painting at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. Active on the international art scene since the s, she is known for her work within the Neo-Expressionism movement of the s, as well as her continually evolving style. Much of her oeuvre features elements of symbolism, involving the creation of magical universes blend elements of her animals, humans, and plants. Her work has been featured in a number of solo exhibitions in Japan and Europe, and is held in the permanent collections of major institutions such at the Centre Pompidou, Kunstmuseum Basel, Kunstmuseum Bern, Kunsthaus Zurich, and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. In , she had her first solo exhibition in Mexico at the Museo de Arte de Zapopan.

Biography

Leiko Ikemura studied at Osaka University from to , majoring in Spanish. She then left Japan to study in Spain from to at the Academia de Bellas Artes in Granada and Seville. In , Ikemura moved to Zurich to pursue a career as an artist. Her first solo exhibition in a public institution took place in at the "Bonn Kunstverein", in Bonn, Germany. That same year, she received the Stadterichnerin von Nurnberg, an artist residency facilitated by Faber-Castell and the City of Nuremberg.

A year later, the artist relocated to Germany, moving to Munich in and then Cologne in , where she developed an interest in sculpture and began experimenting with mediums such as bronze and ceramic.

In , Ikemura became a professor of painting at the Universität der Künste (University of the Arts) in Berlin.

Leiko Ikemura lives and works in Berlin and Cologne. Since , she has also held a

70th 'Art Encouragement Prize of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Japan' for

 
Cologne Fine Art Prize, Germany 
Sparda Art Prize NRW, Hasen-Tempel, Recklinghausen, Germany 

 
JaDe-Prize of the JaDe-Foundation (Japanese-German-Foundation), Cologne, Germany        

 
August Macke Prize, August Macke Curatorial & HSK Meschede, Germany 

 
Artists Residency, "Casa Aguacate", Puerto Vallarta, Mexico 

 
Art Prize ofIserlohn, Community Foundation of the Sparkasse Iserlohn, Germany

 
Artist Residency, The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, New Haven, CT, USA

 
Critics Award for Visual Arts, German Association of Critics, Berlin, Germany  

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EKWC (European Ceramic Workcentre), ´s-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands 

 
Prize of the Jury, International Triennial for Original Graphics, Grenchen, Switzerland 

/84       
"Nürnberger Stadtzeichnerin", Artist Residency Grant by Faber-Castell & Nuremberg, Germany

 
Art Prize of Kaiserswerth, Dusseldorf, Germany 
Prize of the Foundation for Graphic Art in Switzerland, ETH Zurich, Switzerland 
Second Prize of the International Drawings Triennal of the Youth, Nuremberg 

Grant of the City of Zurich, Switzerland 
Art Prize of the Kiefer-Hablitzel Foundation, Switzerland

After studying Spanish at the University of Foreign Studies in Osaka, in Leiko Ikemura moved to Spain, where she studied art for the first time from to at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes de Santa Isabel de Hungría in Seville. In she moved to Zurich, where she began her career as a painter, and in she received a prize from the city of Nuremberg, which allowed her to stay and work there. In she moved to Cologne. She was a professor at the Universität der Künste in Berlin from until , based in both Cologne and Berlin. Since , Ikemura has also been a visiting professor at Joshibi University of Art and Design in Japan. In she received the Art Encouragement Prize from the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.

Having gone to Europe to study art and launch her career as an artist, Ikemura’s work was acclaimed in the s for her large-scale paintings and prolific drawings in the neo-Expressionist style that prevailed in Europe at the time. However, Ikemura herself avoided being consumed by this trend, choosing instead to focus on the originality of her disadvantaged position as an Asian woman. In , she retreated to the Swiss Alps, where she created the “Alpine Indians” series. The s saw a shift in her style towards a series of small paintings of young girls whose outlines seem to blend into monochromatic backgrounds of yellow, blue and black, terracotta statues with hollow bodies that were sometimes faceless, and installations that combined both paintings and sculptures. Ikemura’s figures of young girls are foreigners or strangers to the land in which they find themselves. While they may also be temporary representations of her own ambiguity and instability as a woman, they are certainly neither fragile nor weak. Rather, they are spiritual, liberated beings that sometimes stand with a cat, lie on the ground or fall from the air. The gaping holes in these reclining statues whose hollow bodies are on open display also pr