Leiko Ikemura at Lisson Gallery Los Angeles

Leiko Ikemura at Lisson Gallery Los Angeles

For her first exhibition in Los Angeles, Leiko Ikemura presents a range of works produced over the past decade that explore the relationship between the female body and the natural world; between the heavens and the horizon line, or as she describes it: “the place where two worlds come together”. This in-between space – straddling both light and dark, the sky and the ocean, as well as both interior and exterior worlds – is represented by a huge metallic mesh wave within the gallery, a dividing line and architectural feature designed in collaboration with her partner Philipp von Matt.

One of Ikemura’s hybrid creations – a girl whose head has been replaced by a brace of birds – greets visitors outside the gallery. Inside the exhibition, the recurring figure of a reclining girl or woman is repeated throughout, firstly in a series of large-scale, colored bronzes, such as Lying in Yellow Dress (2021), which depicts a peacefully sleeping creature in a yellow dress. Elsewhere, Double Figure (2021) combines a pair of female forms – one crying into her hands, her legs removed at the waist and the other startlingly lacking a head – which nevertheless resembles a crashing blue wave and a fallen tree trunk. The girl's watery, mountainous or plant-like shapes undulate and merge into larger-than-life amalgams of landscape-bodies or figure-scapes.

Film by Oresti Tsonopoulos.