The Brooklyn Rail

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.

In her figure paintings, Ikemura consistently centers the image in a way that heightens a sense of isolation. Her lone figures sometimes clutch a small animal or perhaps a baby, as in Brave Girl in Pink (2022), where the ghostly subject stands against a blazing red-orange background. The girl’s face disappears into a muddy ether; scarcely etched in furtive brushstrokes, the small cat or dog she holds has been barely summoned into existence. Even more eerie, Blue Mom (2024) shows a blue figure with pinkish hair and a sheer dressing gown clutching a doll or a baby. With narrow, white-pupil eyes staring straight ahead, this outlandish mother and child aim the same penetrating and hypnotic gaze directly at the viewer.\

Elegant, yet discomforting, Ikemura’s recurring Usagi figure appears in several works here, including the towering bronze Usagi Janus (340) (2025), which stands more than eleven feet tall. Wearing a billowing, open dressing gown and topped by a schematic head with pointy bunny ears, the blue patinated sculpture emerges from the artist’s childhood memory of playing a game to find the features of a rabbit on the surface of the moon. Today, however, Ikemura links the image to the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident and uses it as a symbol of the ruin inflicted on Japan’s natural habitats and the birth defects in humans and animals reported in the wake of the disaster. Incongruously, however, Usagi Janus appears welcoming rather than threatening. In this work, as in everything on view, Ikemura suggests a realm of unsettling beauty that is only wistfully reminiscent of the real world.