FUGUE OF BECOMING

BERLIN - Galerie Sara Lily Perez presents Fugue of Becoming, a solo exhibition of new and recent works by Berlin-based Japanese painter Rei Zukidou, on view from 5 September through 17 October 2026. Centered on a new body of work produced in 2026, the exhibition brings together paintings and works on paper that foreground the fluid relationship between figuration and mark-making within Zukidou's practice.

Across the new works, individual gestures remain distinct within expanses of largely open ground. Some appear organic, others calligraphic or diagrammatic, while still others resist immediate identification. Rather than coalescing into fixed images, they register as traces of thought, sensation, and movement - forms held in suspension before meaning becomes settled.

The exhibition's title takes the fugue as both a musical structure and a conceptual model. In a fugue, a subject enters, recurs, is displaced, answered, and transformed. A related logic unfolds across Zukidou's compositions through repetition, interval, variation, and return. Marks recur without becoming identical; visual rhythms emerge across otherwise open surfaces; relationships develop between elements separated by distance and scale. What binds the works is not a single image or motif, but a structure of recurrence continually undergoing change.

Working with pencil, charcoal, watercolor, oil, pastel, and raw canvas or paper, Zukidou maintains an immediate relationship between gesture and surface. A line may remain slight and provisional; a dense passage of pigment may interrupt an otherwise quiet field; minute incidents accumulate without being organized around a conventional compositional center. The surrounding space is active rather than neutral, establishing intervals through which one mark answers, contradicts, or amplifies another.

In Fugue of Becoming, transformation emerges through the continual movement between representation and mark-making. Figurative forms, traces, fragments, and individual gestures enter into relationships without resolving into a singular narrative. Becoming is understood not as the passage from one fixed state to another, but as an ongoing condition in which meaning remains provisional, relational, and in motion.

A private preview will take place on 4 September 2026 from 17:00 to 19:00, followed by the public opening on 5 September from 18:00 to 21:00. During Berlin Art Week, Galerie Sara Lily Perez will present a special collaborative evening with STUDIO183 on 11 September from 17:00 to 20:00, featuring music and drinks courtesy of St-Germain.

Rei Zukidou is a Japanese painter based in Berlin. Working between mark-making and figuration, her practice explores the porous boundaries between the physical and metaphysical, the conscious and unconscious, and the visible and invisible forces that shape existence.

Rooted in an intuitive and embodied process, her mark-making emerges through direct engagement with the canvas, where the momentum of the present moment guides gesture and rhythm, allowing forms to emerge beyond conscious intention. Her figurative works examine the complexities of human experience, moving through shifting states of being while traversing themes of vulnerability, power, violence, resilience, and transformation.

Born in Japan, Zukidou spent part of her childhood between the United Kingdom and Belgium before returning to Japan at the age of eleven. Experiences of cultural and linguistic displacement during these formative years led her to embrace visual language as a means of exploring what cannot be fully articulated through words. Through her dual engagement with mark-making and figuration, she investigates the interconnected nature of all beings and forms, tracing the threads that connect the human body to plants, elements, and the wider forces that flow through all forms of existence.