Raisa Raekallio & Misha del Val

Raisa Raekallio (Kittilä, Finland) and Misha del Val (Bilbao, Spain) are a Lapland-based artist couple working in collaboration in paintings, drawings, ceramics, comic-stripes and performance art pieces. Raekallio and del Val started their working collaboration in 2013 following an uncannily similar sensitivity for art, films and music; a devotion for the forest; and a deplorable sense of humor.

In Raekallio's and del Val's current on-going series of large-format oil paintings in collaboration 'Space Refugees' (2019-20) crowds of cosmic beings journey across the darkness of space, seeking shelter and a safe place to live. They find Earth and arrive, of all places, in the Arctic. These mysterious entities, now wrapped in shimmering space blankets, pose no threat apart from their unsettling otherness. They are vulnerable and endangered beings, just like the environment they appear in. The pictorially alluring silver and golden blankets offer the travelling personages friendliness, protection, and hope, in the same way as the artists find meaning, sanity and the opportunity to fondle the mud of their freedom, in their own blanket of art making.

'Space Refugees' is supported by Arts Promotion Centre Finland, Lapland Arts Council and will be in exhibition during 2020 at tm-galleria (Helsinki), Torre de Ariz, Basauri (Bilbao) and as part of 'Artist of the Month' at Korundi Art Museum (Rovaniemi).

Above: Raisa Raekallio & Misha del Val, Untitled, oil on linen, 145 x 170 cm. 2019 outside the artists' studio in Sirkka.
Raisa Raekallio & Misha del Val 'Captain Painting and Space Refugees in Space Blankets' oil on linen, 145 x 170 cm. 2019

UPCOMING

tm-galleria, Helsinki, Finland
8 Jul - 2 Aug 2020

Torre de Ariz, Basauri (Bilbao), Spain
28 Feb - 29 Mar 2020

Korundi Art Museum, Rovaniemi, Finland
Artists' Association of Lapland - Artist of the Month
Sep 2020

Galleria NAPA, Rovaniemi, Finland
Taidemaalariliiton Lapin Juhlanäyttely
Oct 2019