Leiko Ikemura looks back at how her time in the Swiss Grisons mountains altered her work forever.

In 1989, Japanese artist Leiko Ikemura, born in 1951 and living in Europe since 1972, came to Switzerland to work in the Grisons mountains for a full year. This retreat proved to be a period of radical artistic reorientation. Inspired by intense experiences of nature, her paintings of that time merge humans and their existential themes into an infinite cosmos.

In Leiko Ikemura: The Sea in the Mountains, published in conjunction with a solo exhibition at the Bündner Kunstmuseum Chur, Ikemura talks to curator Damian Jurt about the search for a new beginning that brought her to the Grisons, and about the artistic breakthroughs that propelled her work into new spheres. This lively dialogue is supplemented with photographs, reproductions of Ikemura’s drawings and paintings, as well as photographic documentation of the exhibition.