Manabu Ikeda is a Japanese contemporary artist known for his highly detailed and meticulously executed pen drawings. Born in Saga Prefecture in 1973, he graduated from the Department of Design at Tokyo University of the Arts and completed his master’s degree at the same institution.

 

Working primarily with pen and ink, Ikeda creates large-scale compositions in which countless fine lines accumulate to form expansive landscapes. His works intertwine elements of nature, urban environments, memory, and imagination, often depicting worlds in which destruction and regeneration coexist. Following the Great East Japan Earthquake, themes of catastrophe and rebirth became increasingly central to his practice.

 

From 2011 to 2013, Ikeda was in residence at the Chazen Museum of Art in Wisconsin, where he completed the monumental work Rebirth, measuring over four meters in width. The work entered the museum’s collection and has since been widely exhibited.

 

In 2023, a major solo exhibition, Manabu Ikeda: Flowers from the Wreckage, was presented at the Audain Art Museum in Whistler, Canada, and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland in 2024. Featuring more than 50 works from Japan and North America, the exhibition marked a significant large-scale retrospective of Ikeda’s work in North America.

 

His works are held in museum and private collections internationally, and he has participated in numerous exhibitions across the United States, Europe, Japan, and beyond. Through the meticulous accumulation of fine lines, Ikeda reconstructs complex worlds in extraordinary detail, offering new possibilities for contemporary landscape representation.