RA TACK

Ra Tack’s canvases are constellations of marks formed from hours of looking outward across Iceland’s dramatic landscapes and inward to trace the emotional journeys one goes on. Steeped in the atmosphere of the fjords, Ra’s paint seems to rise out of the earth. Stem- like streaks dance on an oversaturated cadmium yellow horizon while punches of optimistic floral reds exhale across the canvas, elsewhere dense mycorrhizal nests fester. Many canvases hold these conflicting states within them, as we all do, making them like characters, Tack avatars, that take on the atmosphere of the room they are in.

Crawling on the floor to be near you (2023)

Oil on Belgian linen
155 x 112 cm

Resting in your arms (2023)

Oil on Belgian linen
120 x 90 cm

And as Always the End is Everything

with Florence Peake at IMT Gallery (2023)
Photo by Peter Otto

Ra’s works, often produced in series, are narratives all of themselves. Reading the landscape, the colours, reflected in the intensity of layering of paint are imprinted onto the works but don’t depict them. To look into the paintings, to look slowly, is to notice how they swell, staccato marks erasing past pleasures, paint redefining emotional journeys. For Ra, painting is an act of survival and these paintings are personal testimony to that. Their titles, I Took Back Your Hand and Crawling on the Floor to Be Near You could be read at either end of a relationship’s pendulum.

I took back your hand (2023)

Oil on Belgian linen
90 x 70 cm

I'm always watching you from the other side (2023)

Oil on Belgian linen
92 x 72 cm

Ra Tack is a Belgian painter, living and working in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland. They hold a BA and MFA in painting from The Royal Academy of Fine Arts, KASK and University College Ghent, Belgium. Tack’s work has been exhibited widely, including solo and group exhibitions in London, Ghent, Berlin, New York, Copenhagen, and Marrakech. Recent selected solo exhibitions: You are in my world now, Skriðuklaustur Museum (2024);Tell me I will be fine after all, Associate Gallery (2024); Let Me Untangle Your Tenderness, IMT Gallery, London (2022); I don’t know how to human in theatre of nature, Sláturhúsið, Egilstaddir (2020) and Still Life 1, AreaA, Berlin (2020). Selected group exhibitions: Unknown Benevolence, curated by Pórhildur Tinna Sigurd, Hafnarborg Museum (2024); And as always, the end is everything. (with Florence Peake), IMT Gallery, London (2023); Winter Lights Festival, Reykjavík (2022) and Sunset before feeling your complexity, Ásmundarsalur, Reykjavik (2021). Unknown Benevolence will be touring to Sláturhúsið, Eglisstadir in January to March 2025. They will be participating in List Í Ljósi (Winter Lights Festival), Seyðisfjörður in collaboration with Sarah Ann Banks on 14 – 15 February 2025, and exhibiting alongside Julie Lænkholm in Skaftfell, Seyðisfjörður in April 2025.

Unknown Benevolence

at Hafnarborg (2024)
Photo by Leifur Wilberg Orrason