Fujiko Nakaya does not need clay for her sculptures. She neither carves them from marble nor mills them from wood. The 92-year-old artist’s most important material is familiar and yet impossible to grasp: fog. “The atmosphere is the form; the wind is the chisel,” she says of her work. She sees herself as someone who shapes, but does not model. Instead, she creates the conditions for nature to express itself. When I first saw her installation at Haus der Kunst in Munich in 2022, I spent almost an entire afternoon in the museum without realizing it. I followed the clouds from inside and out to the English Garden. At times, they hung in dense swathes; at others, they appeared as a fine veil. I stood still as the fog slowly became lighter and dissolved, only to form again right behind me. Since then, I’ve been lucky enough to experience Nakaya’s works in different places, in nature and amid architecture. In a park three hours from Bangkok, in a museum in Tokyo, and in the sculpture garden of the Neue Nationalgalerie. Following last year’s success, her fleeting fog installations can be experienced again this summer in Mies van der Rohe’s building. In contrast to the marble, steel, and glass, a special in-between moment emerges here as Nakaya’s fog dissolves the building’s strict, elegant forms.
Between 10-17h, time pauses for just under ten minutes every hour and half hour. Then, the space belongs to the fog. Move in and with it, or watch the choreography of clouds through the wide glass façade, a spectacle unfolding on a 90-meter-wide screen. The sculptures by Henri Laurens and Wolfgang Mattheuer, weighing several tons, seem to become as light as a feather as they’re covered by clouds. The fog plays around their contours, gradually unfolding its quiet presence. In just a few minutes, Nakaya makes the massive sculptures almost completely disappear. Here and there, only a pedestal, a fragment, a piece of bronze or stone remains visible. Little by little, they reappear: Alicia Kwade’s “Goldelse”, with its billowing skirt, looks as if it were walking on clouds. Every Thursday, the fog installation can seen until 19h. A brief moment to pause, meditate, and breathe after work. There is probably no better way to mark the end of the workday. Just as Nakaya’s sculptures dissolve into thin air in the garden of the Nationalgalerie, thoughts of the office dissolve along with them.
Text: Laura Storfner / Photos: David von Becker / Credit: Neue Nationalgalerie – Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz
Neue Nationalgalerie, Potsdamer Str.50, 10785 Berlin–Tiergarten; map
Fujiko Nakaya: Fog Sculpture in the Sculpture Garden of the Neue Nationalgalerie until 25.10.2026. The sculpture starts every hour and half hour between 10 and 17h and on Thursdays until 19h.
@neuenationalgalerie
