Rachel Garrard

The Nave

König Galerie is pleased to present Manifestations In The Light, Rachel Garrard’s second exhibition with the gallery, in the Nave of St. Agnes in Berlin.

The exhibition takes its title from Pert em Hru, the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, variously translated as “Coming Forth by Day” or “Manifested in the Light.” The text is concerned not simply with death, but with navigation: how consciousness moves through transforming states of matter and light, and what it might mean to come through changed. St. Agnes, a deconsecrated Brutalist church that retains the proportions and atmosphere of a place built for transcendence, provides the architectural setting for this exploration.

Visitors ascend into the Nave past Journey Through The Night, a large diptych painted in deep atmospheric blues, in which landscape, celestial bodies, geometric forms and human figures are suspended together in a single field. The painting is both arrival and overture, a cosmological diagram of passage that the rest of the exhibition slowly unfolds.

The floor is matter. A grid of quartz powder maps the space, and within it, found objects gathered from around Berlin (rocks, branches and fragments of everyday life) are arranged as glyphs drawn from a personal symbolic language Garrard has developed over many years. Informed by ancient ritual traditions and propositions in quantum physics, the objects are placed in precise relation to one another, describing pathways through nonlinear time. They carry the weight and specificity of physical things while functioning simultaneously as signs within a larger system.

The paintings are manifestations. Rock and mineral pigments on raw linen (lapis lazuli, malachite, iron and ochres) are transformed into images: portals, mirrored axes, triangulations and radiant centres. These are not illustrations of a specific mythology, but intuitive propositions, imagined architectures that move between symmetry and dissolution, stability and change, suggesting realities that lie just beyond ordinary perception. Here, mineral matter becomes colour, and colour becomes a form that points beyond itself.

At the far end of the nave, the final painting is light. Incorporating mica, the work reduces the exhibition’s language to almost nothing but mineral and light. Faint geometric traces emerge across its reflective surface, appearing and disappearing as the viewer moves and the light changes. From a distance, the surface reads as an almost empty reflective field. Up close, a ghost of a painting gradually reveals itself. Rather than depicting light, the work is activated by it, its form continually manifesting and receding according to the changing conditions of the space.

Manifestations In The Light traces a passage from matter to image to light, offering a visual map for navigating transformation, a set of instructions whose meaning is never entirely fixed. Through geometry, mineral matter and light, Garrard explores the shifting boundaries between the visible and the unseen, where forms emerge and recede, and what was previously imperceptible momentarily comes into view.

Rachel Garrard (b. 1984) lives and works in New York and Mexico. She earned a BFA and MFA at Central Saint Martins, London. Garrard’s multifaceted practice integrates painting, sculpture, sound, installation, and video, articulating a view of reality in which the border between the physical and ephemeral is porous and ever-shifting. Her paintings are composed of natural substances, such as quartz, ash, or rock powder pigment, that she has personally collected, hand-ground, and applied to raw linen canvas through a process of fine layering translucent washes of color. The applied pigment becomes a physical register of place, a palimpsest of past experiences, and a portal to the metaphysical landscape of memory.

Garrard’s work has been featured at the Academy Mansion, NYC (2023); Casa Wabi, Mexico (2022); Hammond Museum, NY (2019); Kraftwerk, Berlin (2017); Pioneer Works, NYC (2016); the National Academy Museum, NYC (2015), Métropole Musée d’Art Moderne, France (2015); Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City (2014), among many others.