The Albertina Museum in Vienna presents "Motherscape," the first major exhibition in Austria featuring Japanese artist Leiko Ikemura, showcasing her distinctive blend of protective rabbit-women figures and dreamlike body landscapes. The 74-year-old Berlin-based artist, known for her multimedia approach spanning sculpture, painting, drawing, video, and poetry, has created a magical forest of references where Asian and Western iconographies merge under what she describes as specifically feminine, feminist moonlight.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is Ikemura's nearly eleven-foot-tall Usagi Kannon figure, displayed in the Albertina's pillar hall. This fairytale-like chimera combines elements of girl, animal, and goddess, with a skirt that opens like a gate reminiscent of a protective mantle Madonna. The figure's paws are folded prayer-like against its chest, tears appear to stream down the woman's face, and bronze rabbit ears stand erect like horns, their polished tips gleaming like glowing antennas pointing toward hypnotic worlds of fluid feminine nature.
Ikemura names these figures "Usagi," after the Japanese word for rabbit, which is also a popular girl's name deeply rooted in the country's contemporary pop culture. The famous Japanese manga superhero Sailor Moon's civilian name is Usagi Tsukino, meaning "Moon Rabbit." According to Japanese legend, instead of a man in the moon as in Western culture, a fertile rabbit lives there, grinding rice flour in a mortar.
Born in Japan, Ikemura soon moved to Europe, where she first studied literature in Spain, held her first exhibitions in Switzerland, and in 1991 became the first foreign female professor at Berlin's University of the Arts (UDK). She recalls with little fondness the rather rough, machismo-driven atmosphere among her male colleagues at the time. The current Albertina exhibition, conceived by Director Ralph Gleis during his Berlin years, represents her first major showing in Austria.
Rather than a pure retrospective, the exhibition focuses on recent works while including some delicately disturbing, fragile drawings from the mid-1990s that highlight the continuity of the "girls" theme in Ikemura's work. The artist insists on never calling them "girls" in German (Mädchen), preferring the English "girls," which she considers more cheeky, stronger, and harder.
Some of the early pastels inevitably recall Maria Lassnig's coloration, whom Ikemura counts among the artists who influenced her, alongside abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell and others. Her love for animals and nature connects her to Lassnig but pushes these themes further. The Albertina recently acquired a nine-meter-wide, nearly bucolic triptych from 2015, which Gleis considers one of Ikemura's major works and now hangs prominently in the pillar hall.
Created through tempera painting on jute, the work displays fascinatingly pale coloring that opens generous dreamscapes where suggested bodies and environments merge. "Motherscape," the exhibition's title, represents a word creation combining "mother" and "landscape," reflecting Ikemura's multidisciplinary expression through sculpture, painting, drawing, video, and poetry. As she writes in one of her poems: "When I close my eyes longer / I am in the flow of glittering images / The landscape becomes liquid and I dream myself in."
The exhibition runs daily from 10 AM to 6 PM, with extended hours until 9 PM on Wednesdays and Fridays, through April 6 at the Albertina Museum in Vienna.
