Leiko Ikemura

Leiko Ikemura is one of the best known artists of Japanese origin in the West. Born 1951, she read Spanish literature in Osaka and in Salamanca and Granada. Her education as an artist she did at the academy of fine arts in Seville. She has been a professor for art at the Berlin University of the Arts since 1991 and lives and works in Berlin and Cologne. Leiko Ikemura's work - including drawing painting and sculpture - has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in museums and galleries and at biennals in Europe, the U.S., Australia, and Japan and is represented in many public collections in Europe and Japan. The essence of her oeuvre are her drawings. Oscillating between light and dark, joy and pain, day and dream they show a vast and secretive universe beyond space and time, populated by maiden-like beings and by fantastic animals and things."Leiko Ikemura" is the most recent and most comprehensive monograph on this fascinating artist and presents more than 200 drawings, the majority of them previously unpublished, alongside a selection of her paintings and sculptures. Essays by specialist authors, including the renown American art critic Donald Kuspit, complement the images.