Leiko IkemuraMomstars

MONSTER … MOMS … MOMSTERS … or better MOMSTARS! With her expressive and combative imagery, Leiko Ikemura, born in Tsu in Japan, first caused a stir in the 1980s in the circle of the Neue Wilde. Today she is internationally renowned for her girls hovering in intermediate worlds and for her cosmic landscapes with their fairy-tale hybrid creatures, as could be seen in shows at the Kunstmuseum Basel and at the National Art Center in Tokyo. In Japan she is celebrated as an artist who, precisely through her consistent immersion in Western art, has become increasingly aware of her own cultural origins and has arrived at a unique synthesis of the two cultures. At CFA Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin she now occupies both floors of the gallery in order to show works from all the periods of her career, up to her most recent sculptures. Leiko Ikemura initially studied literature in Osaka and in Spain, before taking up painting at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes in Seville around 1973. She subsequently lived in Zurich, from the 1980s in Cologne and, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, in Berlin as well, where from 1991 she held a professorship for painting at the Universität der Künste. In her contribution, Anaël Pigeat writes that the artist still lives, like the cat within her, in the place where history can be felt on the street, on the outer skin of the walls and in the behaviour of passers-by. In a malleable city in constant transition, whose geographies today have nothing more in common with those of the time when she arrived. A city in which politics can be seen on the street, just as in her work: from one form to the next.

Exhibition:
Contemporary Fine Arts CFA Berlin, 16/3 – 20/4/2024