Lisson Street: Leiko Ikemura – El Jardín Nocturno

Leiko Ikemura's Lisson Street presentation coincides with major shows at both Lisson Los Angeles and at the Albertina museum in Vienna. Following the London gallery's seasonal theme of Landscope – artistic responses to the natural world through varied lenses and viewpoints – Ikemura presents a nocturnal garden, El Jardín Nocturno, through a variety of sculptures, paintings, works on paper and poems.

The viewer enters the garden on the ground floor, where three sculptures are nestled in an undulating field of green stone. Ikemura's central and imposing Rocket Girl (2024) squats menacingly, being at once a symbol of chaotic, destructive forces, but also a figure for protective good, here guarding the two cat-like statues of Miko and Mikolina in the corner. Existing between genders and species, these three bronzes are also seemingly emerging from their terrain, sculpted through the primordial energy of the earth. A sense of prehistoric time also bubbles up from the inky depths of a lake in the nearby painted Nightscape (2024), while upstairs the twilit garden flowers into daytime with pink blooms in a suite of rose-tinted canvases and gesture-filled fields of marks that coalesce into magical, light-filled landscapes, punctuated by Ikemura's cascading haikus in Japanese script.