Leiko Ikemura (b. 1951, Nagasaki, Japan) is a Swiss-Japanese artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans painting, sculpture, drawing, and photography. Moving between figurative and abstract languages, her work explores themes of metamorphosis, hybridity, and the shifting boundaries between human, animal, and landscape forms. Her visual vocabulary is marked by ethereal, often androgynous figures that appear in states of transformation, dissolving into atmospheric, elemental spaces.
Ikemura’s practice reflects a sustained engagement with questions of identity, memory, and transcendence, informed by her transnational trajectory between Japan and Europe. After studying in Japan and Spain, she settled in Switzerland before establishing herself in Germany, where she has taught at the Berlin University of the Arts since 1991.
Her paintings balance fragility and intensity through luminous, translucent surfaces, while her sculptures extend these concerns into three-dimensional form, emphasizing organic distortion and poetic ambiguity. Across media, she constructs worlds in which figures exist in liminal states, suspended between becoming and disappearance.
Her work has been exhibited internationally at major institutions including the Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Albertina, and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. Recent exhibitions include The Sea in the Mountains at the Bündner Kunstmuseum, Chur (2025) and Motherscape at the Albertina, Vienna (2025–26). Her work is held in significant public collections including the Centre Pompidou, Kunstmuseum Basel, Kunstmuseum Bern, Kunsthaus Zürich, and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.