Leiko Ikemura Toward New Seas

Featuring more than four decades of Leiko Ikemura's work in nearly every medium, this book presents an artist who fuses together Eastern and Western cultures.

Luminous, large-scale paintings, fantastical, chimerical sculpture, girlish warriors, and Amazon goddesses--Leiko Ikemura's artistic output is as diverse as it is prolific. In this book that gathers together drawings, monotypes, paintings, and sculpture, Ikemura's unique talent for fusing Eastern and Western art is profoundly evident. In her work, Ikemura explores themes of hybridity, cross-culturalism, sexuality, and death. She works at the intersection of abstraction and figuration, shifting fluidly between media, and imbuing her pieces with raw energy and emotion. Ikemura's exotic landscapes emerge from tempera-like washes. Her terra-cotta and bronze sculpture is both feminine and timeless and her unique pictorial language manifests itself in landscapes and figures that summon a sense of loss. Whether she's celebrating the power of the female form or exploring a misty dreamscape, Ikemura achieves a unique synthesis of cultures, traditions, and perceptions in everything she creates.

ANITA HALDEMANN is Head of the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Kunstmuseum in Basel in Switzerland.