AYAKO ROKKAKU
SCENERY IN THE PROCESS OF BEING FORMED

KÖNIG GALERIE
ALEXANDRINENSTRASSE 118–121, 10969 BERLIN

16 JANUARY – 5 APRIL 2026

OPENING
15 JANUARY 2026 | 6 – 8 PM

KÖNIG GALERIE presents Ayako Rokkaku’s fourth solo exhibition SCENERY IN THE KÖNIG GALERIE presents Ayako Rokkaku’s fourth solo exhibition SCENERY IN THE PROCESS OF BEING FORMED, with the gallery, on view in the Nave of St. Agnes. Bringing together a wide-ranging sculptural practice alongside a new body of paintings, the exhibition traces the artist’s movement through places, materials, and atmospheres—and how form slowly emerges through her hands. 
 
SCENERY IN THE PROCESS OF BEING FORMED reflects Rokkaku’s experience of letting landscapes enter her daily life: the light of a new city, the textures of a market, the rhythm of a coastline. These impressions accumulate quietly, becoming sensations she tends to with the same instinctive, tactile approach that guides her making. Rokkaku works without mediation—paint spread by hand, clay shaped through touch, fabrics gathered, sewn piece by piece, glass guided through fingertip gestures — allowing each material to register the immediacy of her encounter. The works appear gradually, as if formed at the pace of an emotion revealing itself.

Ayako Rokkaku, UNTITLED 2024

The glass works, created early 2025 in Murano at the Berengo Studio, hold soft traces of her gestures within their colored surfaces, as though the movement of her hand had settled into the molten material. Nearby, a fabric installation inspired by Seoul’s Namsan hill unfolds from threads and fragments collected at Dongdaemun Market and assembled by hand, its layered textures echoing the density and verticality of the city. 
 
Ceramic sculptures made during her stay on Mallorca carry the warmth of their Mediterranean origin; their contours feel shaped by touch, as if the porous clay retained the memory of the artist’s palms and fingertips. These forms reappear in another register in the bronze works realized at the Noack Foundry in Berlin, where the immediacy of her hand-molded clay models are preserved in metal. 
 
A new series of paintings accompanies the sculptures. Their drifting colors suggest mountains, sea, and interior terrains without fixing them, arising—like the sculptures—from an interplay between place, sensation, and touch. Through this process, landscapes are not depicted but felt into being. 
 
Across the Nave, Rokkaku’s works form an environment where touch and perception move together, giving shape to scenes that are still forming, still gathering themselves into view. 

FEATURED ARTIST

AYAKO ROKKAKU
Ayako Rokkaku (b. 1982 in Chiba, Japan) lives and works between Berlin, Porto, and Tokyo. Her artistic process involves an instinctive and performative approach, as she uses her bare hands to apply acrylic paint, translating the motion of her body onto the canvas. True to her distinctive technique, she moulds figures with the tips of her fingers, whether on canvas, through glass, or in bronze.

Rokkaku’s visual language seamlessly shifts between elusive abstract formations and figurative elements, drawing inspiration from the kawaii culture (Japanese for cute) and capturing the boundless imagination of a child. Rokkaku is known for he...
Read more