Natalia Rak
Polen
With luminous colours, clear compositions and a deliberately female perspective, Natalia Rak brings fresh energy to urban art, a movement whose global presence keeps growing. Her paintings tell stories and draw viewers in with an almost magical intensity.From Canvas to FaçadeNatalia Rak was born in Poland in 1986. As a child she already wanted to paint, and she experimented with drawing, screen printing, graphic design, painting and sculpture. At the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź she studied fine art with a focus on graphic design and illustration, graduating in 2012. Her first large-format works, on canvas, date from 2011. Since then she has painted murals on commission around the world, on brick, concrete and façades several storeys high.Stories Between Dream and RealityAt the heart of her work is the threshold between reality and dream. Her figures inhabit surreal scenes that draw on Polish folklore and the tradition of the fairy tale. Influences from Polish painting, including Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz and Jacek Malczewski, as well as from comics and illustration, also run through her work.Colour heightens the power of these stories: luminous red meets turquoise, orange meets deep green and violet. Much of the intensity comes from oil paint, which she often combines with acrylic. Her classical training shows in the assurance with which she renders bodies, fabrics and light. Her figures are stylised, yet deeply realistic.Murals and FestivalsNatalia Rak has been invited to many renowned urban art festivals, including the Walk & Talk Festival on the Azores, the No Name Festival in France, the STROKE Art Fair and Art Whino.In 2013, at the Folk on the Street festival in Białystok, she painted The Legend of Giants. It shows a girl, a giant, caring for a tree that grows directly in front of the wall. The mural draws on a local legend: giants first destroy the world around them, then learn to protect nature. She completed the work in seven days. The same year she was the only woman and the youngest artist at the Richmond Mural Project in the United States.Art magazines named The Legend of Giants one of the five best urban artworks of 2013, alongside works by Banksy and JR. Hi-Fructose highlighted the same year that her style and technical skill are equally convincing on canvas and on walls.AwardsIn 2013 she won the Art Battle in New York, a competition in which artists paint live in front of an audience.Exhibitions with Pretty PortalIn 2014 Pretty Portal presented her exhibition Through the Looking Glass, which is exemplary of her visual language: a figure steps into another world, like Alice. In 2016 she took part in the group exhibition Lovely People alongside Pixelpancho and Sokar Uno. In 2021 she participated in the group exhibition Bestranged.In 2024 Pretty Portal organised and curated the project Kultur meets Euro in Düsseldorf, in which Natalia Rak took part.