Entitled With Blue Birds, the PalaisPopulaire is dedicating a presentation to Leiko Ikemura, which combines sculptural loans with works on paper from the Deutsche Bank Collection in front of the institution and in the rotunda.

Ikemura’s art draws inspiration from old Japanese masters, surrealism, postwar modernism, and the renewed figurative painting of the 1980s. Her work presents hybrid, mythological beings, girls, and women transitioning between human, animal, and plant forms. They explore psychological, social, and spiritual states and the relationship between civilization and nature. The usagi, Japanese for rabbit, first appeared as a central motif in Ikemura's sculptural work in 2011 after the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, evolving from her paintings. This creature with rabbit ears and a human face symbolizes universal mourning, but also resilience and renewal. Ikemura’s figures wear cone-shaped, hollow skirts reminiscent of ritual robes or architecture, addressing the relationship between inner and outer reality.

The presentation highlights this dialectic. On Bebelplatz, the Figure with Three Birds (2021) invites visitors to linger. This round form is echoed in the rotunda inside the building, where the totemic Hare Column III (2021) stands in the center, surrounded by early, rarely shown drawings. The view circles back outside to the other sculpture, offering an almost serene meditation on the delicate state of the world.

Leiko Ikemura: Figure with Three Birds, 2021 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024

Erwin Wurm "Tor (Skins)"

The artist Erwin Wurm turns the rules of sculpture on their head. Wurm’s performative and ephemeral sculptures are conquering museums, where visitors can make themselves into sculptures with a few banal objects. For all the comedy and punch, it’s about formal questions: What is the object? What is the subject? Wurm experiments with two- and three-dimensionality, with mass, surface, and volume. More iconic works emerged, such as the “fat” cars and single-family houses that look as if they have been blown up.

In his most recent sculptures from the series Skins (2021), one of which is now being presented in front of the PalaisPopulaire as part of SculpturePopulaire, Wurm takes the opposite approach. He radically reduces the volume. His works, which are almost four meters high, look like suit bags or skins from which the bodies have been sucked out. The filigree, fragile-looking sculptures consist of partial casts of living models who bend over, lift, and hold objects. The artist’s relationship to his models is crucial here. In the case of Skins, they include Michael, the artist’s son, and the actor and artist Lars Eidinger, with whom Wurm has worked closely for a long time.

Erwin Wurm, Tor (Skins), 2021 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023, Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac, London/Paris/Salzburg/Seoul, Photo: Mathias Schormann

Bunny Rogers "Techo Statue (turquoise)"

Bunny Rogers, born in Houston in 1990, was socialized with the Internet. She grew up in the late 1990s with online communities such as AOL Kids and Second Life, and on the platform Neopets she designed digital figures for the virtual planet Neopia, which is inhabited by Neopets and other creatures. Her enigmatic sculptures, installations, paintings, performances, and videos made her a shooting star of the young U.S. scene. In them, she conjures up a traumatic teen cosmos that penetrates deep into America’s psyche and social reality.

Her bronze-cast Techo Statue (turquoise), 2021, which will be presented in front of the PalaisPopulaire, was created from Roger’s early designs and ties in to a sense of community and the utopian idea of building new worlds. Yet this work also has the gothic appeal so typical of Rogers, with figures reminiscent of ancient gargoyles.

Bunny Rogers, Techo Statue (turquoise), 2021 © Courtesy the artist, Société, Berlin and Thaddaeus Ropac, London/Paris/Salzburg/Seoul; Photo: Mathias Schormann

VALIE EXPORT “Die Doppelgängerin”

From September 2020, the sculpture Die Doppelgängerin (2010/20) by the Austrian filmmaker, media and performance artist VALIE EXPORT was on view in front of the PalaisPopulaire. Two gigantic scissors are interlocked to form a figure that is both delicate and threatening. The work, which is over four meters high, triggers myriad associations. Traditionally, scissors are associated with sewing, tailoring, and other “feminine” spheres, but also with the male fear of castration and violence with “female” connotations.

Born in 1940, VALIE EXPORT is one of the pioneers of the feminist avant-garde and conceptual media, performance art, and film art. One of the leading representatives of the “European Expanded Cinema” movement, she attempted back in the 1960s to radically push the boundaries of conventional cinema. Time and time again, the artist, born in 1940, has addressed discrimination against women and violence directed against females with hotly debated actions and works such as her famous Tapp- und Tastkino (Tap and Touch Cinema, 1968).

VALIE EXPORT, Die Doppelgängerin, 2010/2020 © VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2020, Courtesy the artist and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London · Paris · Salzburg, Photo: Mathias Schormann