With Everybody’s in the Room, Galerie Judin proudly presents Ellen Akimoto’s second solo exhibition with the gallery – featuring, at its center, her most ambitious painting to date. Spanning twelve meters across six large-format panels, each increasingly spaced apart, this monumental work also lends its title to the show.

The narrative opens in a schematic interior densely populated by human figures caught in heightened emotional states: shouting, grappling, desperation, fury, exaltation – and the occasional attempt to flee. A notorious black cat, both curious and wary, observes the tumult from a safe distance. What at first appears to be an ensemble of random individuals reveals itself to be a set of recurring archetypes. Their expressive gestures dominate the confined space. Except for a rug that delineates the arena of confrontation, there seem to be no objects in sight. However, looking more closely, the viewer can see a few pale forms drifting out of the room – a toothbrush, a charging cable, a tea towel.

This trickle turns into a flow as the sequence progresses across the panels and the scene begins to be populated by more objects – an apple, a cap, a heart, a houseplant, and so on – all rendered as spectral presences floating across the composition. These ghostlike forms eventually dissipate into a gently undulating landscape that carries a distinctively Japanese aesthetic. As the physical distance between panels increases, so too does the degree of abstraction of these symbolic objects. Akimoto deftly explores the shifting significance of our relationships – to ourselves, to others, and to the material world that surrounds us.

This dynamic is also particularly poignant in Ghost Room, where a couple’s emotionally charged interaction plays out in a sparse interior, with the couple and their objects flying as disembodied echoes – or perhaps imagined projections – of inner turmoil. Related themes recur throughout the exhibition’s twelve new paintings, notably in Sliding Glass Door and Not Alone in the Pool. Here, as so often in Akimoto’s work, architectural elements mirror or fragmentize the human figure, suggesting a psychological architecture just as complex and layered