Ayako Rokkaku

As part of the programme devoted to the Blanca and Borja Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, the museum presents the first exhibition in Spain by artist Ayako Rokkaku. The show features a selection of twenty-nine pieces created between 2001 and 2025, including paintings, sculptures, an installation and a live painting performance in front of the audience, on May 23rd. 

Ayako Rokkaku was born in Chiba (Japan) and currently lives and works between Berlin, Porto and Tokyo. Having painted from her earliest childhood, she became an artist in her twenties. Rokkaku loves abstract painting – on her first trip to New York she was thrilled to discover the works of Jackson Pollock and Cy Twombly – but feels it should include eyes, ears or horns, and small figures that reveal living animation. Her paintings portray creatures with large eyes floating among multicoloured clouds; ever-changing rainbow clouds that represent transience. Rokkaku has found other characters floating among clouds in Tintoretto’s Paradise, on display in the hall of our museum, a work to which she renders tribute in a painting called Paradise and in the title of this exhibition. For the artist, Paradise is not a fixed place or a final stage, but an ephemeral sensation that we experience, yet cannot hold on to. 

Rokkaku does not apply paint with brushes, but with her fingers, sometimes on found supports. In this she follows a long tradition of finger painting that dates back to prehistoric times and extends to Miró, Pollock and Twombly. For Rokkaku, it is another way of recapturing the world of childhood, the freedom of the child. Tactile sensations are a source of inspiration for her and a basic channel for receiving and transmitting energy. 

Rokkaku’s practice is improvised and spontaneous: she almost always begins without making precise sketches beforehand, and even when she has an initial idea, it is often transformed during the painting process. Her enormous interest in the process has also led her to engage in pictorial performances: live painting sessions in front of an audience, in which the artist gives herself over to the act of painting with a concentration that radiates serenity. Live painting, confined to a very limited time period, is better than any other at capturing the value of the present moment; the moment that we feel Paradise. 

The exhibition includes a live painting.