Leiko Ikemura’s luminous forms dialogue with Venice’s Old Masters
At the Gallerie dell'Accademia, the Japanese artist's exploration of light, glass and the female form unfolds in conversation with Renaissance masterworks, challenging centuries of artistic convention.
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Light moves through glass with an almost sentient grace in Leiko Ikemura’s incandescent meditation on form, presence and the body’s place within art history. At the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, her exhibition TransLucent unfolds as a deliberate conversation between the contemporary and the eternal, between the artist’s sculptural and painterly explorations and the Old Masters whose works share these hallowed walls.
For more than four decades, Ikemura has moved fluidly across disciplines, her practice refusing the boundaries that typically contain artistic vision. Painting, drawing, sculpture and glass become vehicles for examining transition, cross culturalism and collective responsibility, each medium chosen with precision to articulate a particular truth. At the heart of this Venice presentation lies her series Sleeping Heads, works that radiate a quiet intensity as they meditate on Venetian iconography and the representation of the female form across centuries. These pieces enter into a visual and conceptual dialogue with the surrounding collection, most notably with Titian’s Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, creating a temporal bridge where Renaissance reverence meets contemporary consciousness.
Ikemura’s body of work serves as a profound act of artistic reclamation, liberating the female form from the passive roles it has historically occupied in mainstream culture and artistic tradition. Her interventions are not aggressive but rather elegantly subversive, challenging conventions through the sheer force of her vision and technical mastery. Glass, in particular, allows her to explore transparency and illumination as metaphors for visibility, agency and the power of being truly seen.
Supported by the Ikemura Foundation, this ninth edition of The Venice Glass Week 2026 positions the artist’s practice at the centre of a broader cultural conversation about craft, materiality and the evolution of artistic language. The exhibition becomes less a retrospective display and more an active dialogue, inviting visitors to reconsider how we understand beauty, form and representation when historical narratives are gently, profoundly disrupted.
Imagery courtesy of Lisson Gallery (@lisson_gallery).
