Leiko Ikemura | de sensu | Contemporary Fine Arts (CFA Berlin) | 11.09.-24.10.2026

until 24.10. | #5160ARTatBerlin | Contemporary Fine Arts presents from Friday, 11. September 2026 (Vernissage: 10.09.) the exhibition de sensu by the artist Leiko Ikemura.

Contemporary Fine Arts presents the second solo exhibition of internationally acclaimed artist Leiko Ikemura at its Berlin gallery.

Under the title de sensu, the exhibition brings together new paintings and sculptures that examine the relationship between perception, body, mind, and space. The Latin title de sensu—“through the senses”—points to a central concern of the exhibition: the experience of the world beyond the purely visual. Suggestions of touch, imagined sounds, and scents expand perception towards a synesthetic experience, inviting viewers to consider their own bodies as part of a broader spatial and social context.

Starting from a state of uncertainty, Ikemura explores possibilities of reorientation within a world characterised by continual change. The heightened awareness of the senses becomes a process of searching and rediscovery—an awakening of consciousness to the surrounding environment and to one’s own position within it.

The exhibition’s spatial composition is defined by three green figures: Green Baby, Green Mom, and Dear Spirit. Green walls, complemented by accents of yellow and deep blue light, evoke the transitional atmosphere between day and night. This liminal setting alludes to cycles of emergence and disappearance, becoming and passing away. Within this environment, the figure in mamagirl appears as a watchful presence accompanying the space of transition.

With the new sculpture Milk Lady, Ikemura further develops her exploration of care, transformation, and renewal. The figure appears to absorb energy and return it as nourishment for new life, suggesting a continuous exchange and a cyclical process of regeneration. The exhibition thus evokes a creaturely cycle without a fixed beginning or end.

Since the 1980s, Ikemura’s practice has engaged with themes of transition, transculturality, and collective consciousness beyond the boundaries of nation and gender. Her diverse body of work encompasses luminous, often monumental paintings, introspective drawings and watercolours, as well as sculptures in glazed terracotta, glass, and ceramics.

Ikemura’s figures frequently take the form of female spirits or otherworldly beings. They combine qualities of childlike defiance and independence with fragility and an ethereal presence, appearing to inhabit multiple worlds simultaneously. Mythical hybrid figures situated between human and animal forms are a recurring element of her visual language. Among the most recognisable is Usagi, which combines rabbit ears with a human female body. Ikemura first developed the motif in response to the nuclear disaster in Fukushima. It has since come to embody universal suffering, resilience, and the possibility of renewal.

Ikemura’s artistic vocabulary draws upon a broad range of cultural and art-historical references. The East Asian Sansuiga tradition of landscape painting, the work of the great Japanese masters, Surrealism, post-war abstraction, and the figurative painting of the 1980s—which Ikemura herself helped shape—inform her practice. These diverse influences converge within her work to form a distinctive visual language that moves between abstraction and figuration, the familiar and the unfamiliar, and the human and the mythical.

Leiko Ikemura was born in Tsu, Mie Prefecture, Japan, and lives and works in Berlin. She studied at Osaka University of Foreign Studies and at the University of Fine Arts in Seville before settling in Europe. From 1991 to 2015, she was Professor of Painting at the Berlin University of the Arts.

Ikemura’s works are held in major international museum collections, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Kunstmuseum Basel; and Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf.

Her recent solo exhibitions include Motherscape, Albertina, Vienna (2025); Das Meer in den Bergen, Kunstmuseum Chur (2025); Rising Light / Frozen Moment, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2024–2025); Floating Spheres, Kunsthalle Emden (2024); When Animals Become Art, The Feuerle Collection, Berlin (2023); año del usagi, Museo de Arte de Zapopan, Guadalajara, Mexico (2023); Witty Witches, Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin (2023); and Towards New Seas, Kunstmuseum Basel (2019).

In 2025, Ikemura was awarded the title of “Person of Cultural Merit” by the Japanese government in recognition of her significant contribution to culture.

Title image caption: Leiko Ikemura, Green Mom (Detail), 2025, Tempera and oil on jute, 210,5 × 120,5 cm