TAMARA RAKIĆ

Tamara Rakić was born in 1961 in Belgrade.

She graduated and obtained her master’s degree at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade, at the Sculpture Department, in the class of Professor Nikola Koka Janković.

From 1984 to 2005, she held the status of an independent artist. From 2005 to 2025, she worked at the secondary art school Tehnoart Belgrade. She has been a member of The Association of Fine Artists of Serbia (ULUS) since 1986. She holds the status of a distinguished artist since 2006.

She has held 28 solo exhibitions in the country and abroad and exhibited at 100 group exhibitions. Her 12 sculptures are installed in public space. Her artworks are found in numerous public and private collections in the country and abroad. She has represented the country at the International Symposium in Tunis and was chosen for the Serbian delegation for the SNBA exhibition in the Louvre.

She has received several awards:

2019. 2 Golden Prize, Padova, Italy
2020. First prize for sculpture, October Salon, Kovin, Serbia
2021. First prize for small format, International exhibition Small format, Gallery of the Cultural Center, Šabac, Serbia
2022. Golden Chisel, ULUS Spring Exhibition, Cvijeta Zuzorić, Belgrade, Serbia
2023. Grand Prix for Sculpture, Exhibition of Modern and Contemporary European Art, Galerie du Carré à la Farine Farine, Versailles, France
2024. Special Jury Prize, Salon SNBA Carrousel du Louvre, Paris, France /the entire delegation of Serbia and Montenegro was awarded/
2025. Prize for portrait, Youth Center Gallery, Ivanjica, Yugoslavia

If I had the choice of one word only to describe the artistic work of Tamara Rakic, that word would be: excitement. The very excitement of a little girl I once was when I saw her sculptures for the first time in gallery Kolarac. At that moment I was incurably, forever infected with the bug of the most beautiful profession in the world: making sculptures. This feeling is still present, to this very day.

The sheer joy, energy, emotional charge held in one breath, liveliness, timeless optimism, sincerity, density of consideration presented in three dimension, inspiration held up in the perfect moment to be the message, the idea, written down for all times and generations to be remembered and to inspire – are just some of the words that I could use to describe her work.

Starting with full plasticity on to diaphanous, delicate forms…always moving, always in motion, mesmerizing. Refined feeling of just measure and subtle detailing bring together in her sculptures the unbelievable power and most delicate gentleness to an unbreakable unity shining with its own perfection.

Even more perfection would not make these works better – and that precisely is essential. The art is here to enchant us, to occupy us, to absorb us, to make us slide into the world of emotions and sensations, outside of reality – yet projecting this very reality in such a way that we fall in infinite love with it.

The sculptural space is being thought through and modelled not just by filling it up, but in equal measure by orchestrating the voids: using delicate lines to delineate the void or cut through it. In this way Tamara works using bronze and ether in equal measure, creating architectural forms woven of fullness and emptiness. Her work represents a profound understanding of the spatial esthetics – esthetics which is used to package her impressions and artistic ideas into three-dimensional forms of frozen moments she uses to hold and keep forever her experience of reality. Bent arches, gates, round lines, forms so elongated and thinned and almost reduced to the lines of a drawing, lively effervescence and group dynamism preserving collective energy – all of these are fragments of the subconscious translated into perennial symbols, archetypal messages communicating with the unconscious in every one of us. This is maybe the secret not only of Tamara’s art, but of art in general. Here for us to absorb it, and to let it show us what it is that we have in us and around us is, without us noticing it or being conscious of it.

Living in the world of Tamara Rakic’s sculptures is to live in the world of little stories carrying big messages.

Be it running flat out, or alert and still in a moment of contemplation, idleness, facing the challenges life brings or getting ready for acrobatics, the greyhounds of Tamara tall and willowy as they are, long legged heroes long of neck and nose ready to deal with every challenge, are sending us a message:

Like father talking to his children, the greyhound is telling us that life is a journey to be travelled bravely with joyful heart, sometimes by oneself or in a group of lifelong friends and family, but always remembering that life is beautiful and that we should walk it courageously.

This is the gift of Tamara’s art. The gift for us all, for those girls and boys deep in every one of us observing the world with their souls and a sincere gaze.

Vladislava Krstic, sculptor

Long presence and constant relevance of Tamara’s work are rooted in the fundamentals of her artistic education as well as in the fact the she established her poetic on the vide and deep enough basis – from the very moment of stepping on the public artistic scene – for her earliest works to already possess all the elements to be developed and worked through in her later sculptures and sculptural cycles.

Material is always accented, as a building block but also as an integral part of the formulation of her ideas and emotions.

The emotions are of great strength but tightly packed and subordinated to the form with extraordinary lightness. The goal to achieve is always ideational-plasticity in nature, not a literary one in spite of the fact that Tamara is, and always was a figurative artist.

She is very strong natured and sensitive, and the emotional is visibly superior to the rational in all her works: Elongated and elegant with a dynamic, diaphanous, sometimes even perforated form. In her entire opus we witness an omnipresent sensibility for space and multiple spatial games, including the most critical of all: articulation of void and emptiness. Her drawings and sculpting action grow together, none more dominant than the other. While sculpting the drawing is not interrupted, so one has the impression that the plastic forms are incentivized with the presence and influence of the drawing. Some of her sculptures feel as if the drawing itself gained a new strength and materialized itself in the new, unknown drawing medium – and we see it happen in some of her magical spatial drawings.

Maybe we could even say that Tamara’s entire opus is the distancing from the undefined, haphazard, unclear… the world of her symbols is precise and rich in meaning.

The greyhound is personifying her entire being, it is racing through her entire work. It is a powerful metaphor making it possible for her to comment her understanding of the world, to confirm her creative and poetic being, and to show up as a true humanist.

All of the above needed saying, from the professional point of view and for the purpose of being included in a catalogue.

However, Tamara is a close personal friend of more than 50 years. Before we met the world of sculpture, we met each other. I know full well that the red line going through her entire professional and personal existence is love, not only limitless but unconditional love. I understood after much questioning that is truly possible to always, constantly, help and assist (materially, spiritually, emotionally, physically..) a countless number of people, dogs, cats, children, birds and all those in need the way she does, all the while working devotedly in the artist studio – that it is possible once these two life impulses are woven together in a single artistic creed.

Marijana Gvozdenovic, sculptor

Tamara is reminding us that the art is not expressed by form alone. She is awakening something invisible yet authentic – because the experience is situated within the relation between the observer and the work observed.

Her sculptures are charged with silence interrupting presence, and this presence is not limited to the exhibition space alone, but remains with everybody who has the opportunity to experience them.

And this is the situation of self-discovery. The story Tamara’s hands are sculpting offers precisely that: encounter of souls: Looking at the images her sculptures are mirroring back at us, while we attempt to measure moments in time we discover the timeless.

Petra Mihajlovic, sculptor

I have tried many times to start working on a new sculpture – to “sketch” it – with a drawing. It never worked for me, so very soon I would move on to work directly with the sculpting material. The feeling was that the material would not appreciate me finding the solution on paper first. My first encounter with spatial sketching happened towards the end of my academic studies: I was to give a lesson in class to a group of high school students as part of passing an exam in methodology of teaching art.  The task was sketching with wire in space. A good process for me, but also for the high school students who discovered the existence of a third dimension. A drawing is a know-how of values and relationships in the X-Y world. Discovering the Z axis and leaving my comfort zone was a way to literally open a new dimension for me – that in spite of dealing with it all through my previous five years of study, but I did not experience it as a dimension then.

All these memories and impressions came true for me again when I discovered the sculptures of Tamara Rakic: I understood that somebody else also was aware, like in my theory, of coming out of the two dimensional world in such a way that adds the values of what is seen and experienced. In Tamara’s case the sculpture is not just an entry into space: it is a many-sided object to be observed from different positions. The real experience happens when walking around the sculpture, thus confirming that the artistic value of the third dimension lies in the invitation to move and discover, not in stopping us in our tracks to proclaim one position superior to others. In a miraculous way Tamara’s sculpture is using the drawing as means of spatial expression. The material follows the drawing and makes bold excursions in the new dimension.

Second important category that would not be so easy to see failing a good drawing in space is the movement. A sculpture aiming to represent a movement usually ends up being an inert freeze –frame in time. But in this case, Tamara’s sculpture is the frame stopped to perfection, telling us the story of what came before, and what will come after. Unburdened with any feeling of difficulty in execution everything seems so light, easy like a retelling of an event.

It always gladdens my heart when I can learn something from a colleague, when I find confirmation in my own works. Were Tamara in that class I taught long time ago, she would have left with highest marks!

Marko Crnobrnja, colleague

Tamara Rakic is of a generation of artists present on Serbian art scene for four decades already. Technically speaking, she belongs to Koka’s school of modelling. That is to say that sculptural forms are directly and patiently constructed – the construction is done by means of a controlled tactile gestures, carrying out a complex procedure where the outline drawing and inner logic play essential role in articulating and defining the form.

Tamara always lived with dogs. More often than not, with several dogs. Almost always rescued dogs. Mostly street dogs, and once a greyhound happened to find his way in. As part of her everyday life shared with dogs, Tamara passionately drew and sculpted them. In the search for expression the greyhound imposed itself – with its physical features – as having an ideal form for the creation of an authentic sculptural vocabulary. The elasticity, willowy body, pliability, speed, motion, elegance where more than enough to launch a sculptor’s imagination. All these features can be used formally as sculptural values. This is a must for Tamara’s sculptures. Conceptually speaking the endless variations and changeability of this animal specimen as interpreted by Tamara Rakic evolved into a symbol, a sign, a spatial ideogram. It is all done with the intention to transform a formal play into a metaphor about life: a life destined to try and find balance between freedom and denial, between freedom and the impossibility to realize itself under the same and equal conditions. Here these sculptures speak the language of personal rebellion – a rebellion which in any case expects from art the liberation and truth. After all, the “task” of any art is to instigate, and reevaluate things.

In spite of having an animalistic denominator and blueprint, looking at these works in the spirit of animalistic sculpture would be a mistake. Considering the way Tamara Rakic manipulates the forms and flexibilities of certain “figures” one could rather speak of anthropomorphic or floral origins.

“Greyhounds” as a symbol can be read in several different ways. Likewise, the sculpture can be observed for a long time, and only then, when the experience settles we could consider psychological denominators of these works, pointing often to restlessness and anxiety.

Examining the importance and possibility of contextualization – which become the blueprint for the interpretation of modern art – Tamara is changing the circumstances of grouping her spatial ideograms. The difference in formal solutions changes their semantic potential. The work “It’s raining cats and dogs (no cats)” is framed in a metal construction of Euclidian space. Tamara used thin wires to tie to this frame a number of animal spinning bundles performing some kind of acrobatics. Casting additional light on this spatial arrangement, the choreography is multiplying in complexity, making for a more dense and dynamic space. This imaginary strongbox of our reality, through the metaphor of evasion which mixes the forms with their shadows, is being presented by means of a new perplexing narrative, telling a story of a well-trained company performing a shadow theatre in a storm.

In the works “What now” and “Accurate measure” the protagonists are nailed to the soil, as is the case with Giacometti’s “Walking man” and “Leaning man”. The figure in “Accurate measure” is provocative in its elaborate dance, finding a humorous solution for its condition by means of being tied to a 2 Kg weight. “What now” is a question mark, as well as an open key-hole for the answer to be inserted in it. Upon consideration we could say that Tamara is “only” toying with possible messages, allowing these invented signs to evolve like plants growing in equal measure the fruits of sense and nonsense.

Life is tragic, and every art – consciously or unconsciously – has to take that into account. Art is a way to go beyond this inevitability. Is such art possible today, or at any time actually, art capable of bridging the gulf between man and nature, between man and circumstances, between man and his destiny? Ultimately, the gulf between man and smart technology which one day will kindly ask us to service it, oil it, wait on it, nurse it. The unique creativity of these works is having a premonition of possible exit from this enchanted circle. Incomparable and enigmatic need of the creative spirit to express itself is the only way to make sense of this fight. Art need not be subversive to be of its time and engaged.

The times of great revolutions in esthetics belong to the past. It is difficult to foresee the direction of the future development of art. But one thing is for sure – AI will stake its claim to, I dare not say it will take, equal place of authorship in conceptual art. This will add even more importance to the intimate strategies of creators as time goes by. We might call it a privilege of authentic, or artistic poetics. The work, opus, of Tamara Rakic falls in this latter strategy, persistently continuing to search for answers to the most pressing existentialist questions.

Colleague from Koka’s class,
Zdravko Joksimovic