Born in Mexico of a Mexican mother and a Japanese Father, Hisae Ikenaga has been exposed early on to cultural diversity. Her journey as an artist brought her to Spain about 12 years ago, and finally to Luxembourg where she now lives and pursues her artistic career.
Ikenaga is fascinated with familiar objects like furniture and books, which she examines, alters and combines to provide alternative meanings and uses. In her series she tackles different issues; she confronts industrial versus craftsmanship, she humanizes objects, she utilizes global objects - i.e. objects that are purchased in multinational chain stores. She explores the possible physical anomalies developed in mass produced objects and industrial materials. Defective goods, malformations and monstrosities.. Ikenaga recreates and changes the genetics of manufactured objects alluding to risks of malformations - irony, absurdity and humor consistently play a key role in her works. Wooden bench folded on itself, impossible chairs, compose a catalog of anthropomorphic goods. The result is new uncertain objects, prone to the immediate chaos.
Charlotte’s Side Talk with Hisae Ikenaga
In “Football pitch metric system”, Ikenaga measures different spaces in relation to other spaces or things. The references used have little in common with the established decimal metric system. In “Multifunctional” she transforms pieces of furniture by adding parts of other pieces of furniture, resulting in multi-purposed objects. Her body of work on pieces that reproduce the production of tubular metal furniture reflects on the transient boundaries between design and art as an everyday object.
Duchamp, the foundational father of the appropriation of manufactured objects, is key to Ikenaga’s work, and very much present in the Mexican artist’s series with furniture. Ikenaga deconstructs them and re-arranges their parts giving them an anthropomorphic aspect, or even transforming them into an instrument for artistic participation. Her reflection around the object leads to an artisanal production of elements which reference nature, using distinctly artificial materials. Ikenaga’s practice is not exclusively ludic or melancholic. Impregnated with the futile and transitory, which are taken from Japanese art, her different series seem to participate in a fluctuant way in both motivations.
Hisae Ikenaga (Mexico, 1977) studied at Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado La Esmeralda in Mexico City, broadening her education at the University of Art and Design of Kyoto. In 2003, she studies a Master’s Degree on Theory and Practice of Contemporary Visual Arts at the Fine Arts Faculty of Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She has had solo exhibitions in Arróniz Arte Contemporáneo (México City 2019), Octave Cowbell (Metz 2017), Matadero (Madrid, 2011), La Casa Encendida (Madrid 2009), Praxis International Art (New York, 2011) and has participated in group exhibitions in Sweden (Ikea Museum, Älmhult, 2018), Germany (Kreativquartier, Munich, 2014), Mexico (Museo del Chopo, Mexico City, 2011), Hong Kong (Para/Site Art Space, 2009), United States (Praxis Gallery, NY, 2008), Japan (Prinz Gallery, Kyoto, 2001), among others.
Last year Hisae Ikenaga has been awarded with the 2020 LEAP Prize (Luxembourg Encouragement for Artists Prize). The jury praised the great coherence in her work, rich in multiple interdisciplinary references and evocative of the diversity of human work both in industrial and artisanal production, in addition to the touches of irony introduced that transgress the apparent minimalism.
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