Leiko Ikemura: Talk to the sky, seeking light
Lisson gallery, NYC
New York, 1 May – 1 August 2025
Images courtesy of Lisson Gallery and the artist
Leiko Ikemura’s current exhibition at Lisson Gallery confirms her position as one of contemporary art’s more elusive shape-shifters. A Japanese-born, Europe-based artist with decades of interdisciplinary practice, Ikemura continues to draw power from a personal cosmology where the boundaries between human, spirit, and landscape dissolve. The show includes new sculptures and paintings, and like much of her work, it hovers between tenderness and unease, the mythical and the bodily. It’s a reminder of how quietly formidable she can be.
At the heart of the exhibition is a haunting painting—an otherworldly portrait that feels more like a visitation than a depiction. A spectral figure, rendered in oil and tempera on canvas, stares out with a face of deep cerulean blue, its eyes luminous and unblinking. The being, crowned in a pink halo, cradles a smaller creature in its arms, one that glows with a faint ember-red warmth. The figure’s form dissolves into a skirt of radiating yellow light, barely distinct from the nocturnal black that surrounds it. This painting feels like a dream retrieved in fragments—half celestial Madonna, half nocturnal guardian. It doesn’t tell a story so much as suggest a psychic condition: watchfulness, care, and mystery.
In the same space, her sculpture Usagi Kannon—a recurring form in her work—commands quiet reverence. Cast in patinated bronze, the large, hollow figure presents itself with palms gently pressed together and rabbit ears crowning its head. The skirted lower half is perforated with star-like holes, and an arched doorway opens into the figure’s interior, inviting viewers to step inside. “It is a space for contemplation, a refuge,” Ikemura has said in past interviews, and that intention radiates through the form. It’s both shelter and relic, evoking Buddhist iconography, pre-modern animism, and a protective maternal presence. You could call it a post-nuclear fertility goddess, or a spirit shelter for a damaged planet.
There’s a deep, time-traveling logic to Ikemura’s practice. Born in Japan and long based in Germany and Switzerland, she has never subscribed to the narrative conventions of either tradition. Instead, she courts the ephemeral, drawing from poetry, myth, and trauma. These works feel like residue from a long-forgotten folklore. Even the materials seem to breathe differently—paintings thin as gauze, bronze glowing like weathered bone. Ikemura’s work does not stand apart from nature, but seems to bloom from it. In this way, her figures aren’t posed; they emerge.
What makes this show linger is not its drama—there’s very little—but its density. The two central works—one painting, one sculpture—function as dual altars. They don’t explain or perform. They simply occupy space with an uncanny poise, like sentient relics waiting to be re-understood. In a world drowning in spectacle and urgency, Ikemura’s restraint feels not passive, but radical.
In the end, this is a show about how to inhabit mystery. Ikemura does not so much reveal as whisper, refusing resolution in favor of transformation. What she gives us is less a body of work than a passage—through sorrow, history, and cosmic twilight—into the imaginative unknown.
