‘The artist works in a structured way and recycle elements from previous works. He recodes the images and creates new riddles for the viewer. He may find the basis in his immediate surroundings or when travelling, but he transforms everything into personal statements, in which trees, clouds, suns and tree stumps turn into letters – punctuation – on the picture plane.’
E. Steffensen, in Tal R: Weather Report, exh. cat., Båstad: Ravinen Kulturhus, 2024, p. 31
‘Tal R has been working his way through figurations and abstractions his entire life as an artist, his light touch proving that paintings aren’t for undertakers but make up a vigorous and vibrant field of geometric fantasies, decorative mark-making and naturalistically legible shapes like trees. There are a lot of those in his new works, perhaps because he has been living close to the sweeping scenery and varied woodland of Tisvilde Hegn, near glades, open skies – landscape sensations with the sea as a backdrop for the woods.’
E. Steffensen, ’Mark-Making’, in Tal R: Sølvbryn, Copenhagen: Galleri Bo Bjerggaard, 2023, n.p.
‘The new works, with titles such as Silver Fringe, Salt Tree, Two-legged Pink Forest Edge and Fallen Tree, stem from the artist’s interest in the nature around him, whether the forest or the garden, or a flower on the table in the living room. But there is never any direct translation of reality in Tal R’s works. Often he sends off the motifs elsewhere on circuitous routes, where they then crystallise into new forms and vivid colours on canvases and other painted surfaces.’
E. Steffensen, in Tal R: Weather Report, exh. cat., Båstad: Ravinen Kulturhus, 2024, p. 29
‘Although, internationally, Tal R is perhaps best known for his colourful, impactful paintings, he is equally at home working with a range of other media, based on his unique “overlapping” technique: painting, drawing, collage, graphics, sculpture and installation. When it comes to expressing his reality through art, the sky would seem to be the limit.’
C. Jönsson, in Tal R: Weather Report, exh. cat., Båstad: Ravinen Kulturhus, 2024, p. 7
‘Tal R often uses ornaments and patterns to mediate between the highly diverse things that appear on the surface. This is very characteristic of Tal R who does not strive for harmony between the objects but, on the contrary, confronts them with each other, often letting them appear in spaces without depth. The ornament or pattern is the underlying motive force, greatly aided by Tal R’s distinctive colour scheme with the mid-tones he uses so often. He rarely employs the spectral colours so frequently used in modernist art.’
L. Bonde, ‘Tal R At Home’, in Tal R: Alene Hjemme / Home Alone, exh. cat., Charlottenlund: Ordrupgaard, 2021, p. 93
‘Looking at Tal R’s works is a pleasantly unsettling experience, not least of all because you can never put your finger on precisely what you’re looking at. With their bright colours and playful visual language, each one is an invitation: they extend a hand to the viewer. “A painting is above all a conversation,” the artist says. With recognisable motifs and simple titles he tempts the public into his own universe. He allows the painting to make the first move. But once inside, the narrative ceases and you are left with your own imagination. The longer you look, the more you get the feeling that the essence lies not in what you see but in what you do not see, in what is happening behind the façade.’
E. Postma, ‘Collage of the Mind’, in Academy of Tal Art in Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, exh. cat., Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, 2017, n. p.
‘In 2009 Tal R stepped away from oil paint and began to mix pigment crystals with rabbit skin glue, which is traditionally used to prime canvases. In this, a technique known as distemper, he was encouraged by Peter Doig, with whom he was teaching in Düsseldorf. […] Tal R would stick with this format, augmenting it with pastels and wax crayon, for eight or nine years, and it shifted his painting on its axis.’
M. Herbert, ‘Enter the Shlomo’, in Tal R, London: Lund Humphries, 2019, p. 73
‘Tal R’s large-format collages are their very own species of “clean-up operations”. They convert the “collage principle” into a process where, in the end, not even every part need necessarily be glued in place. His collages are accumulations of drawings and symbols, clippings from commercial prints, photocopies, snippets of memories, and photographs of artefacts as reproductions of an unknown world. Against a single background, merging as a whole, they still maintain the character of complex “collections” of pieces of information.’
A. Heil, ‘Whatever is, is almost right. The Principle of “Ophbning”, in Academy of Tal R, exh. cat., Humlebæk: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2017, p. 75
‘One of Tal R’s earliest sculptural realisations was that a piece of fruit that had been on his bedside table for a while became a sculpture if he poked holes for eyes, a nose and a mouth into its soft flesh. […] These sculptural experiments were merely preparation, a way of approaching figurative sculpture, the three-dimensional work of art, in an investigative, exploratory way using materials like bundles of clothes, ceramics, wood, papier mâché, plaster and clay. From these composite rehearsals in materials like fabric and wooden blocks, the figuration has now come into its own, insisting on forming a whole – on becoming a figure.’
C. Buhl Andersen, in Tal R: Animals and people, Copenhagen: Glyptotek, 2021, p. 14
‘In 2000, for example, he pointedly began his series House of Prince, a sequence of almost 200 colourful paintings that look like flags for non-existent nations, ensigns and envoys from a world of the imagination. In a manner that would become characteristic, they employ a series of compositional rules. Many of them share a format, diagonal corners and a vertical band across the base, within which Tal R restlessly innovates.’
M. Herbert, ‘Kolbojnik’, in Tal R, London: Lund Humphries, 2019, p. 30
‘At this time, in the late 1990s, his work was sometimes a “grab bag” of almost anything, not necessarily brushes and paint. […] The grab bag contains everything Tal R is increasingly working with in this period, all the things he picks up, tears out, scissors and moves into art. The “bag man”, or the kibbutz kolbojnik (Hebrew word for “garbagecan”) […] demonstrates mobility regarding the idea of the academy as a “house”. Home is not just the artist’s parallel place of learning, it is also his studio.’
A. Kold, ‘Shadow and Substance’, in Academy of Tal R, exh. cat., Humlebæk: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2017, p. 41
All works: © Tal R, courtesy of the artist
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