Welcome And The Collecting Question

Jeppe Curth 0:00

Hi, and welcome to the Collector's Edge for Nordic Art Partners. In today's episode, we are diving into the world of Leko Ikamoda, a Japanese artist who has developed a highly distinctive language. With me in the studio is our art expert Nicolas Robinson, and I'm your host, Jebekurt. Let's get started.

SPEAKER_03 0:21

It is with Alex Rotta at 400 million. Selling here at Christie's $400 million is the bid, and the piece is sold.

Nicholas Robinson 0:31

We've all heard about it. Sometimes it's front page news. Important works of art are being sold for incredible sums of money. But can you get involved and become a part of the exclusive club yourself? And how do you get started while avoiding buying the wrong things? That's exactly what this podcast is about. This is The Collector's Edge from Nordic Art Partners, a podcast for those of you interested in the mechanics of the art industry, want advice about putting money into art, or simply want to buy something for your walls to beautify your surroundings. Whatever your objectives, it is possible to put money into art wisely, to be considered, thoughtful, and well informed in your choices and actions. Welcome to the art of collecting with an eye for curated beauty and practical value. Hi Nick. Good morning.

Jeppe Curth 1:30

Good morning. How are you doing?

Nicholas Robinson 1:31

Very well, thank you. Yeah, but how are you today?

Jeppe Curth 1:33

I'm good, I'm good. Quite excited. I mean, uh, we're gonna talk about an artist, Ikemura.

Nicholas Robinson 1:38

Liko Ikamura, correct?

Jeppe Curth 1:40

Yes, that have been on your radar for quite a long time, but from my perspective, it in a shorter period of time where I really fall in love with her works. So today I'm quite excited to understand more about it. Good.

Nicholas Robinson 1:53

Let's learn about what she's up to and Yeah, yeah, good.

Jeppe Curth 1:57

So I think we should do as always and and start on the background and some bias.

Leiko Ikemura’s Life And Training

Nicholas Robinson 2:03

Very good. Well, Leiko Ikimura, as you might well assume from her name, is Japanese in origin. She was born in 1951 in Tsu, Japan, making her 75 years of age. But today she divides her time between Cologne and Berlin. She's become essentially, or by association, a j German painter of sorts. At the beginning of her life as an artist, she studied at the Osaka University of Foreign Studies from 1970 to 1972. And this was followed by a classical fine arts education in Sevilla, Spain, of all places, from 1973 to 1978. And then in 1979, she moved to Zurich in order to pursue a career as an artist. In 1991, she became a professor of painting at the University der Kunst in Berlin. And this was stepping into a very specific lineage, the same academic tradition, lineage as artists that had preceded her, such as Karl Horst Hurdeke and Markus Luperz, both sort of titans of this German expressionism. So since 2014, she has also held a professorship at the Jushiba University of Art and Design near Tokyo. So she is a professional painter, but also an academic, in that she is also now responsible for teaching and leading a new generation of artists that she is a professor to. And since the 1980s, when her kind of career as an artist began in earnest, you might say, she's been known for her luminous ethereal paintings, mainly of women, girls, and also landscapes. And they they somewhat evoke a Japanese or East Asian tradition. She's also known for her sculptures, which can be made from bronze and or ceramic, and even latterly of glass. And these often depict animal figures or sort of animal human hybrid figures, including one she is most known for, which is that of a large, upright figure of a sort of a human rabbit hybrid, uh known by the Japanese word usagi. So her works display a strong cross-culturalism, as you would expect, of an artist that is sort of equally imbued with Asian and Western traditions. And her works sort of embody various art artistic ideas, techniques, and expressions from these traditions, often merged within individual works. Can you tell us a little bit more about her works, maybe also the themes?

Core Themes And Shinto Influence

Nicholas Robinson 4:43

Well, I think that this is a sort of a two-part question. Let's let's understand the themes of her works and then we can get into more specifically the media that she uses and and what they look like. But the themes of her works are varied, but the the the main ones I would say are ideas of transience, transformation, and here she explores the transitional period from childhood and the accompanying ideas of innocence of that time of life, which of course is subsequently followed by a loss of that innocence. And so there's that there are paintings that are a little bit about this sort of psychological space that exists between childhood and womanhood in her specific case, meaning that the figures alternately show a particular kind of innocence, vulnerability, or or can conversely show a tremendous strength and poise, and even appear to be a little uh ferocious. So, as a development from that idea, her works embody a very particular kind of hybridity. She's very interested in a sort of a transfiguration of a figure, and this is a little bit sort of also embodied by a Japanese Shinto concept of animism. And this idea is sort of encompasses all natural things which are all thought to possess certain spiritual essence. So as an example, her landscape paintings can often contain fantastic sort of chimerical creatures, and these figures, sometimes faces, sometimes more fully developed figures, they can be seen to be blending into trees or seamlessly into mountains, animals, or even water. So these figures we can we can summarize as sort of blended or hybrid animal human forms. And this comes fundamentally from an Eastern idea, which is sort of at odds with a Western notion, which which sort of contends that humans are somehow separate and maybe even sort of better slash dominant over nature. But in the Shinto tradition, the universe is one where all living matter is interconnected. So it's fluid, in a constant state of flux and transforming. And in the Shinto tradition, people must live in balance and harmony with this. And of course, this can only be achieved by respecting nature, natural forms, natural spirits.

Jeppe Curth 7:20

What do they actually look like?

What The Paintings And Sculptures Look Like

Nicholas Robinson 7:23

Well, we of course we've understood that they are coming from two very specific artistic canons, an East Asian tradition and also a Western painting tradition. I mean, don't forget she's been living and working in Europe now for more than or around 40 years. And we can break down her work really into paintings and sculptures. And the paintings we can most readily summarize as figurative paintings or landscape paintings or paintings that somehow combine these two idioms. Most often her works are painted on a very coarse, highly textured canvas, like a sort of a uh a burlap, which is derived from jute. So it's a very rough, almost like a sack cloth fabric, and you can very you can see a very coarse uh weave through her paintings. Her paint application is often quite rough, quite dry, and almost scumbled across the surface, which can lead to these sort of blurry, softly defined outlines and features, sort of soft quality, a soft focus or melting quality to them, where you see this very rough, coarse Hessian type ground showing through. The figures that she she paints often depict a single woman or a girl, sometimes a woman holding a girl or a baby, and then sometimes two girls or women side by side. The figures are quite raw, expressive, and sometimes even with a tenderness that can recall historic Western tropes like a Madonna and child or even a pieta. And a pietà is the term that we use for the imagery of the Virgin Mary receiving the crucified Christ coming down from the cross. So these figures are quite fragile, ethereal, and and sort of so sketchily painted that they're almost translucent or ghost-like, and they then, you know, they sort of have this very cosmic quality where they're sort of almost floating across the surface. Her palette is quite bold, the the colors are strong, often very vibrant, with strong contrasts uh between the ground and the figure. And her landscape paintings, her landscape paintings often resemble or evoke an Eastern Asian uh tradition, which we call sanswiga, and this literally translated means mountain and water painting. Now, this kind of landscape traditionally is renowned for its calm, poised composition, it's very serene, restful, palette, and it gives it gives these very, very tranquil depictions of nature. Now, traditionally, this was one of the highest and most philosophically significant forms of Far Eastern art. So rather than seeking to depict an objectively realist scene, like much of Western landscape painting, Sanswiga portrays an idealistic, highly conceptual and spiritual view of nature. So these huge ethereal landscapes that she makes, and I don't mean huge in the scale of the canvas or the or the support of the painting, I mean the sense of space that she depicts in the landscape. So she's communicating a strong horizon and this very sort of vast cosmic infinity, often with a very inescapable sense of of deep solitude. And for her for Ikimura, the horizon is is both a literal and symbolic boundary between the grounded visible world and spiritual world or an afterlife. Okay, so that's sums up her paintings. If we look at her sculptures, her sculptural works made in terracotta or or another form of ceramic, they're often clascast in bronze, and in recent times they've even been made out of glass. And these these figures really serve as a sort of a three-dimensional extension of these dreamlike figures that we see in her paintings. She focuses in her in her production methodology on these sort of rough, expressive surfaces, organic textures, and again the subject matter often consists of these sort of hybrid figures which sort of evince a sort of kind of spiritual shamanism in the way they carry themselves, in the expressions they have on their faces, etc. The clay works are built up by hand and often include these very sort of rough textures, very visible joins, and lots of finger marks showing the pinching and pressing and pulling of the clay medium that she's working in. The glass works typically are more recent, and these have a very beautiful otherworldliness to them. She makes the same subjects and themes, but the materiality gives them a very particular kind of luminosity and imbues them with this quality that that m means that they appear to sort of glow from within. And then the most well-known sculptures that she has made are called the Usagi Kanon. And this is like a rabbit bodhisattva, and here we have a monumental rabbit figure fused with the Buddhist goddess of mercy. And this figure features a rabbit face, long wide ears, and a big full-length, billowed-out or bell-shaped skirt that because of the scale of the figure is hollowed from within, allowing a visitor or a viewer to sort of stand within the opened-out skirt. And these sculptures, because of this shelter they provide, they invite the viewer to step in and then offer a certain kind of safety and security through this shelter and protection. And there are quite many of these, in fact, installed in prominent public spaces or sculpture parks around the world. Thank you, Nick.

What Collectors Want Most

Jeppe Curth 13:46

Can I ask, is there is there a body of works that the market have a bigger advertised demand for?

Nicholas Robinson 13:52

Absolutely. When we look at her paintings, we see these female figures. And these female figures are very much a sort of an iconic part of her output. And of course they have varying characteristics, varying expressions, but but this sort of single figure, either with a smaller figure, that is maybe that it is maybe sort of sheltering or mentoring or being a guardian too in some respects, or a mother with a child, or an innocent girl, or a strong, powerful woman. These kinds of figures are the ones that uh she is most known for and the ones that are most sought after and I'm pretty sure most easy to sell. In her sculptural works, there's a lot of works that have a small sort of animal figure hybrid, and you would see these typically on a plinth or whatever, and then of course the very large Usagi Canon or rabbit rabbit figure that I described a moment ago. Now these are very iconic, but I imagine because they're very large, you know, three, four-meter tall bronze works, they're obviously very expensive and prohibitive to most domestic collectors by virtue of scale and price.

Galleries And Global Visibility

Jeppe Curth 15:15

Let's talk a little bit about her markets. Could we maybe start with summary of her galleries?

Nicholas Robinson 15:21

Yes, uh absolutely. Well, she's been exhibiting since the late 1970s. And her definitive breakthrough actually was a was an institutional show, and that was a solo exhibition at the Bonner Kunstverein in Germany in 1983. And this effectively launched her professional career in Germany, and which prompted her actually to move to that country shortly thereafter. Now, today, to this date, she has had almost 400, excuse me, she has had almost a hundred exhibitions over a four-decade career. And today she shows with three main galleries, and they are CFA in Berlin, which is of course a pre-eminent, very well-known gallery with its reputation founded upon its championing of painters. So that's a very apt place for her to be to be working. They have no many other eminent German expressionist painters that they exhibit. She shows with Peter Kilchmann in in Zurich. Now, this is a good, long-established gallery. She shows at Basel with a you know a an a good reputation and a nice market pedigree. But her longest and I I would say most important active gallery relationship is with Karsten Greev. Now, Karsten Grev is a is a really outstanding, outstanding gallerist who I suppose his reputation primarily was built on his long-standing relationship, working relationship with Sai Twombly. But he has shown her work since 1987, and they alone have hosted more than 20 solo shows of her work across their various venues in the cities in which they have galleries. So that's her gallery representation. She also shows with Listen, actually, I should say. And Listen, of course, needs no real introduction. It's a very important gallery, founded and largely based in London, also with a New York outpost. Possibly they have one somewhere else. I'm actually not sure. But that is a very sort of historically quite academic gallery, and that working relationship is somewhat newer, but I think has had some responsibility for propelling her into a more wider consciousness in terms of collectors, the market, possibly even institutions and so on.

Jeppe Curth 17:44

So if you sum up that, you can basically say it says she's covering most of the world. Yeah, yeah.

Nicholas Robinson 17:49

Yes, she's covered most of the world. I mean, certainly her work is increasingly visible. And if she and if she's not showing in gallery exhibitions in far-flung places where the market is strong, she's absolutely having her work included in fairs in those places, be that Hong Kong, Seoul, the Middle East. Her work is is is become highly visible, especially in the last three to five years, I would say. In fairs as well, yeah? Absolutely.

Jeppe Curth 18:20

Yeah, very much so in fairs, yeah. It sounds expensive with all these top galleries. What is her

Primary Prices And Recent Increases

Jeppe Curth 18:27

prices? Well, her prices. Primary prices. Focus on that.

Nicholas Robinson 18:30

Her primary prices. Well, I have a list of some recently exhibited paintings here. I'll just go by the dimensions so you get an idea. An 80 by 80 centimeter painting is 90,000 euros. That would be the price today, or certainly uh as of this past summer, two, three months ago, at the time of this recording. Now, a painting of this size, there's also one actually 100 by 80 centimeters, also costing 90,000 euros. Now, a painting of this size would have cost 65,000 euros two, three years ago. So they've gone up by, let's say, 25, 30% or so in the last couple of years to account for this increase in demand, increase in popularity. 120 by 100 centimeters costs 110,000 euros. And here I have a note saying a 210-centimeter tall painting. This is a painting that would typically be of just like a very large sort of full-size figure, and that would cost 140,000 euros in the recent past.

Jeppe Curth 19:35

What are your thoughts about these prices compared to other similar artists represented by the similar galleries?

Nicholas Robinson 19:41

Well, I think prices are quite reasonable. I mean, of course, this is an expensive thing by most standards, and certainly when you think of, you know, what things cost, the cost of living, you know, this this is an expensive thing to buy. But we know that. We've discussed that about art generally being an expensive or potentially expensive thing, generally. But of course, what something costs and and what value it possesses is a slightly different discussion. But in in the sense of her having a particularly strong intrinsic value, I mean, of course, we don't think that that's up for discussion. We think that's clear, judging by the quality and the credentials that she has. But in terms of the prices and the value in those prices relative to other artists of her peer group and stature, her works are inexpensive. And what has happened in the recent past is that the prices have gone up to try and sort of bridge that gap a little bit. But of course, for many years she was a Japanese woman working in Germany. And it's, you know, it's it's an interesting case. A Japanese woman in Berlin in the 1980s making strong expressive paintings. You know, during this era, her raw, expressive, confrontational compositions, they caused critics and curators to group her directly with the Neue Wilde movement. This means the the young wild ones. And this was a very big movement of painters in Germany in the 80s. But but being a woman, being a foreigner, I'm sure that in a market sense, she was out out outshone or overshadowed in some way, fairly or otherwise, by the sort of prevailing discourse that favored the local male artists. But in recent years, there's been a big revival of interest in figurative painting from the 80s. Now,

Auction Results And 1980s Reappraisal

Nicholas Robinson 21:35

from this generation, there are numerous important movements. There we had expressive painters coming from New York, artists like Schnabel, Basquiat, even James Brown as a sort of a less well known figure whose works people are starting to buy again. In Italy, we had a group called the Transavanguardia, and there we had painters like Enzo Cucchi, Sandrocchia, Francesco. Clemente, who has also been very lumped together with New York artists by virtue of living there. And then in Germany, as I mentioned, rather macho figures making monumental figurative paintings, including Markus Lupertz, Walter Dahn, Jorg Immendorf, and more specifically in Berlin, artists like Karl Horst Herdeker, Rainer Fetting, and Helmut Mittendorff. So now, with a benefit of sort of hindsight and the benefit of, you know, an accumulated sort of overview of the market and of these artists of this generation from these different places, we can see that that there's a certain revisionism and a certain re-sort of sorting out of the place of these artists within this canon, within this subset of the canon, and her work is getting reappraised in a way that is in her favor. In the secondary market, what we've seen is we've seen paintings at auction achieving a similar price to their primary market price. And now that didn't happen for a long time. Of course, as we've seen, the primary market prices have gone up. But a few years ago, in 2022, we saw a figurative painting, 70 by 70 centimetres, selling for 56,000 euros or 60,000. We saw a landscape painting, very similar dimensions, selling for 65,000. So this is spring, summer 2022, paintings achieving the same or slightly more than the primary market prices. And then latterly, we've seen them even creep above that. We've seen a beautiful figurative painting sell in June of this year at Van Ham auctions, and this made $110,000 or 95,000 euros. And this is a it's not a big difference, but this is a painting that would have cost 90,000 euros at primary retail prices, which then most likely could or would have been subject to a discount 10, 12, 15% potentially, where of course it could have then been acquired for 75,000, 80,000 euros. And then her record price at auction is 127,000. But this was for a rather large triptych, that being a painting consisting of three panels, each of which is 100 by 150 centimeters. So this is a somewhat monumental work that in the overall span covers four and a half meters in terms of its lateral scale. So this is a painting that probably would cost quite a lot more than that on the primary market, but we can see that the market is in the process of somehow understanding itself or sorting itself.

Jeppe Curth 24:49

What does this tell

Is Ikemura Still Good Value

Jeppe Curth 24:50

you?

Nicholas Robinson 24:50

Well, it says that it says that people are people are there's a big demand for her paintings on the primary market. We've looked at several at art fairs around the world, and we have been discussing, negotiating, and in the course of doing so, in the course of discussing them with people that we had interested to buy those paintings, those paintings have sold. And they have sold often within a few hours or one or two days, even as our dialogue was taking place, and we have missed out as a result of taking too long to think about it.

Jeppe Curth 25:37

So a question before we maybe sum up. So do you see these works? Do you see this artist as a undervalue uh artist in this market or in general?

Nicholas Robinson 25:51

I don't think they're massively undervalued in this market. I think they're good value. And I think that they are, you know, I mean we we always go back to, you know, what are the sort of inherent qualities of an artist? You know, what makes something good by the criteria that we consider important. And it's very it's a very subjective thing to try and put words on. But but it's also striking when you are not able to put words on it. And by that I mean you're going round a fair, you're looking at things, you're seeing enormous volumes of art, you're getting, you know, a little bit snowblind, you're getting a little bit jaded, your feet are sore, but you see something, and it's the the like of which you really haven't seen before. And it's a little bit of a jolt, it can be a little bit electrifying, it can be a little bit inspiring. And seeing her paintings in this context a few years ago was you know very much that experience. They are so beautiful, they're so magical, there's such an incredible sort of presence in the figures in her paintings. And the neck and the way that she paints, the way that she applies marks to the canvas, the physical properties of her paint, of the surface that she paints on, they're they're amazing. And, you know, w when you see them compared to all the other things around that you're also looking at, you can see that qualitatively they have something that is special. So I think that, you know, to answer your question more directly, I think that they are they're not cheap paintings and the prices have gone up in accordance with their quality, but they are still relatively good value compared to other artists of her stature. And given how beautiful they are, and given that they are have this sort of universal quality, don't forget they have a they have an Eastern quality, they have a Western expressive painting quality. You know, they're rather universal in this way. So her voice, her painting voice, because of her ethnic background, because of her experiences, gives her something that speaks to a very wide audience that that audience is able to recognize in these works. So I think that, you know, I mean, we can see that her recent exhibition career has also reflected a rise in interest in her work. When you look at her museum shows, both group and solo, many of them, many of the most important ones, have taken place since 2020, 2021, which of course to me signals a strong surge of awareness in her practice from the curatorial community. Highlights include an exhibition at the Galleria dell'Accademia in Venice this year. It's either going on now or finished in the recent past, and also a comprehensive solo show at the Albertina in Vienna, appropriately called Motherscape. And this exhibition was spanning the latter part of 2025 and spilled over into this year too. Her work is in the permanent collections of more than 50 premier museums and public institutions worldwide. That includes the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, Kunstmuseum Basel, Kunsthaus Zurich, the Albertina, the Museum Ludwig, the Sainsbury Collection in the UK. I mean, these are these are preeminent collections, many of which are founded on, you know, paintings. So, you know, I think that there's still a way to go. I mean, there's not a big institutional presence in North America. This is changing a little bit. There was a very nice exhibition at the Nevada Museum of Art, which has introduced her sculptures and paintings to an American audience. But this was already 10 years ago. So I do think that there will be some things happening in the American market. And when you have important museum shows in America, because that is the center of the where the wealth is in the collecting community too, obviously this will then start to drive her market commercially as well. So the fact that this is yet to happen, but to my mind, invariably will, probably makes this a very good time to buy her paintings before they jump up again as a result of the institutional exposure in North America, which I expect will follow in the next few years.

SPEAKER_01 30:32

See them.

Where To See The Work And Closing

Nicholas Robinson 30:49

We've seen her works at Freeze in London, we've seen her works at Arco in Madrid. I expect it's possible to to see them in that kind of environment. We've seen them be, you know, we've seen quite a few in in that context. And then otherwise, you know, it's just the same standard kind of research that one can perform online for uh as one can for anything. Her gallery websites have nice information. There's a few nice clips on YouTube where you can see videos of installations, even videos of her giving narrated tours of her exhibition. So this this will give you an overview and a flavour of her work that would be sufficient to gain a greater understanding than uh certainly I've been able to communicate in the course of our last 30 minutes.

Jeppe Curth 31:39

Yeah, you did well, you did well. But in the India, any anything we are missing?

Nicholas Robinson 31:43

No, I don't think so. I mean that's covers you know what she's about and and the state of current market, which I guess is what we seek to summarize when we have these talks.

Jeppe Curth 31:56

Okay, thank you, Nick. Thank you. That was it for this episode of the Collector's Edge. If you are looking for expert insights, want to make informed decisions, and would like advice from independent advisors, send us an email or maybe just call us. You can find all the info on our website, Nordigartpartners.com. Thank you for listening, and we hope to have you back for another episode. Bye.