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At the Bündner Kunstmuseum, Leiko Ikemura allows people and their existential questions to merge into an infinite cosmos.
Image: Keystone
The Bündner Kunstmuseum is showing the Japanese-Swiss artist Leiko Ikemura in a large-scale exhibition. Ikemura focuses on the transitions between man and nature. Her work was also influenced by a working stay in Graubünden.
Ikemura is one of the most important contemporary artists, the art museum announced on Thursday. The exhibition "Leiko Ikemura. The Sea in the Mountains" can be seen in the extension building from August 23 to November 23.
Leiko Ikemura (*1951) moved to Switzerland in 1979. In 1989, she retired to the Grisons mountains for a year to work.
She lived in the mountain village of Sarn am Heinzenberg, worked in the attic of Fürstenau Castle and radically reoriented her work. Inspired by her direct experience of nature, she began to allow people and their existential questions to merge into an infinite cosmos in her painting.
With this exhibition, Ikemura is returning to the region where her artistic work once took shape. "In the combination of painting, sculpture and film projection, she creates a space in which the sea lies over the mountains and time dissolves," wrote the art museum about the exhibition.
It was not only the landscape of Graubünden that had a lasting influence on Ikemura's work. She intensively studied the works of pioneering artists such as Alberto Giacometti from Graubünden and the writings of important thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche.
His idea that everything always returns in a different form is reflected in three works that can be seen in the exhibition. Genesis II, Genesis III and Zarathustra III are large-format tempera paintings on jute in which Ikemura explores the origin and cycles of life.
21.08.2025, 13:34
