Ayako Rokkaku
For the Moments that you feel Paradise
Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Madrid
23 May - 7 September 2025
live-painting
Image © Francis Tsang
© Courtesy of the artist and König Galerie
Untitled, 2021
Acrylic on canvas, 117 x 117 cm
Courtesy of the artist and König Galerie
Untitled, 2001-2006
Acrylic on cardboard
Variable dimensions
Courtesy of the artist and König Galerie
Untitled, 2024
Bronze and acrylic, 43 x 30 x 30 cm
Courtesy of the artist and König Galerie
The Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum is presenting an exhibition dedicated to the Japanese artist AYAKO ROKKAKU (born Chiba, 1982) which traces her artistic evolution through around thirty early and recent works, including paintings, sculptures and installations. For the Moments that you feel Paradise is the latest event in the exhibition programme devoted to the collection of Blanca and Borja Thyssen-Bornemisza, which includes two paintings by the artist. It reveals a universe in constant transformation, in which past and present intermingle and where paradise is not a destination but a fleeting sensation, just beyond reach but always present.
Known for her large-format canvases painted with her fingers, Ayako Rokkaku is an artist who creates immersive worlds that move between the tangible and the imaginary. Her dream figures first appeared in her earliest paintings, which include motifs that have subsequently recurred in her work, such as fish. Decades later these elements have reemerged in new compositions which reflect the artist’s ongoing fascination with change. In Rokkaku’s work nothing is fixed: figures emerge and dissolve, evoking the way clouds constantly change in the sky.
A self-taught artist, Ayako Rokkaku began painting at the age of 19. Experimentation with techniques and materials led her to apply acrylic paint directly with her fingers, a process that she finds natural and essential, and which adds energy to her artistic process. At the outset she employed cardboard as a support, which she tore before or after painting in order to create organic and spontaneous forms and which offered her more freedom than canvas or industrial paper. In her quest for her own style Ayako Rokkaku has continued to experiment with different ideas, such as highlighting motifs with bright pink or including motifs based on creatures with large eyes.
Untitled, 2011
Acrylic on canvas, 100 x 100 cm
Courtesy of the artist and König Galerie
Untitled, 2012
Acrylic on canvas, 100 x 100 cm
Courtesy of the artist and König Galerie
In 2011 Ayako Rokkaku moved from Japan to Berlin where she started to use pencil and crayons and also employed more childlike lines in her compositions with the aim of maintaining both a child’s gaze and the world of childhood. Interested in Abstract Expressionism and artists such as Jackson Pollock and Cy Twombly, whose work she had encountered years before in New York, she now placed more importance on abstract backgrounds in her paintings, in addition to figures or motifs applied to them. Playing with several layers, Rokkaku started adding colours and shapes in front of and behind a principal figure. Multicolored clouds now start to appear in these backgrounds, one of the natural elements most present in the work of this artist, who is attracted to their changing shapes.
In recent years Ayako Rokkaku has also focused on sculpture, firstly in wood and then in bronze, a new approach which poses the challenge of capturing the shapes, style and energy transmitted by her paintings but in three dimensions.
Untitled, 2024
Bronze patined, 83 x 57 x 45 cm
Courtesy of the artist and König Galerie
Untitled, 2024
Acrylic on canvas, 90 x 60 cm
Courtesy of the artist and König Galerie
Paradise, 2025
Acrylic on canvas, 300 x 600 cm
Blanca y Borja Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection
The artist’s most recent and ambitious work is Paradise (2025), a monumental 3 x 6-metre diptych that pays tribute to Tintoretto’s canvas entitled The Paradise in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. This is the first time that Ayako Rokkaku has created a work inspired by another one. Painted around 1588 to decorate the Sala del Gran Consiglio in the Doge's Palace in Venice, Tintoretto's canvas depicts Christ crowning the Virgin beneath the dove of the Holy Spirit and surrounded by angels, cherubim and the religious hierarchies, all floating among clouds and stars. In her version Ayako Rokkaku maintains the dynamic movement of the clouds while expressing her own Paradise in which Christ, crowned with delicate flowers, offers Mary a garland. The work is a compendium of the artist's universe: fish gliding alongside angels; seated rabbits forming circles and ducklings flying up to the sky.
Ayako Rokkaku does not usually make use of sketches, or a predetermined palette and the starting point of her painting is usually improvisation. In addition, since the outset she has made use of “live painting” with the intention of sharing the experience of artistic creation with the public. The artist will offer a pictorial performance at both the inauguration and during the period the exhibition is open.
Publications: Catalogue with texts by Danaï Loukas and Guillermo Solana
Curator: Guillermo Solana, Artistic Director of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza
Coordinator: Paula Luengo, head of the Department of Exhibitions, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza
MUSEO NACIONAL THYSSEN-BORNEMISZA
THYSSEN-BORNEMISZA NATIONAL MUSEUM
Paseo del Prado, 8. 28014, Madrid