Tollef Runquist

My work explores a space where personal reflection meets archetype and play, where fantasy overlaps with the digital and the mythic. As a child, I loved to crouch in the grass, imagining myself a tiny traveler among towering blades. This sense of wonder and enmeshment in the imaginary continues to shape my approach.

A painting, for me, doesn't finish. It reaches a place that feels true enough to leave alone — or it doesn't, and I go back in. Each painting is an intuitive, evolving dialogue between mark and meaning, image and inquiry. Figures, symbols, and artifacts drawn from lived experience, emotional landscapes, and cultural currents emerge as maps and mirrors—sometimes clear, sometimes half-seen—as recurring motifs that surface and eddy, open to emotional, societal, or absurdist readings.

Influenced by Jungian thought and the opacity of folklore, Zen koans, the color and dynamism of comics, and the madness of popular media and memetics, ultimately and most simply, I think my paintings are concerned with the formal aspects of painting. I seek clarity and resonance: color as voice, composition as spell, and a kind of thumped-over-head revelation through frustration and irresolution. Painting for me is a cathartic act, an inquisitive act, and a kind of desperate asking to touch a third rail. I seek healing and understanding, reflection and humor through the discipline and weirdness of the creative process.

This show is called ‘idk’ because that's the truest thing I can say about where I am right now — midway through a career, a practice, a life — often uncomfortable, stunned and amazed and clear and afraid in equal measure. Uncertainty, I don't feel, is a problem to be solved; I seek it actively in my paintings; it might be the work itself. I often feel my most authentic and interesting work arrives when I’m off the map. My paintings are records of experience, and objects of intention and affection. I hope they invite pause, connection, and perhaps a small human salve—a moment of reflection and curiosity—offered as they are, by me who doesn’t know.

Tollef Runquist

IDK, 2026

idk

October 2 – 31, 2026

Selected Works

Press Release