‘Between a painting and a sculpture your eyes will start to wander between these two dimensions. And in the beginning I wanted people to stay either in the dimension of paintings or the dimension of sculptures. But now, I’m really into this idea that the figures that appear in the sculptures also appear in the paintings. I want the viewer to walk through between these different variations of the same idea.’
Tal R, in Boy Looking at the Sun, exh. cat., Rome: Tim Van Laere, 2024, n.p.
‘I always look for the heart of the painting, for the moment when the painting becomes alive, has its own premises and lives in its own world, and where you as an outsider can understand it.’
Tal R, in Boy Looking at the Sun, exh. cat., Rome: Tim Van Laere, 2024, n.p.
‘The artist works in a structured way and recycles 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, exh. cat., Copenhagen: Galleri Bo Bjerggaard, 2023, n.p.
‘A characteristic feature of these sculptures is the forward-directed movement represented by one extended foot, symbolising human progress. The arm posture, on the other hand, brings to mind the rigid stance of figures depicted in ancient Egyptian art. The sculpture’s idiom extends into our time and to Alberto Giacometti who synthesised the postures of the two civilisations in his work Walking Man.’
B. Nilsson, in Tal R: Vrångsidan, exh. cat., Stockholm: Artipelag, 2022, p. 127
‘Birds in cages and flowers in vases. You could hardly find simpler motifs. Yet they quiver at the intersection of something that exists in the world and something that belongs to the space of imagination – like holograms oscillating between representation and abstraction, between bird and BIRD, between flowers and FLOWERS. This is precisely where the dangling and swaying place in Tal R’s paintings can be found.’
P. Albrethsen, in Tal R: Painting, Copenhagen: Strandberg Publishing, 2024, p. 19
‘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
‘In addition to the historical perspective, Tal R’s sculptures foreground a number of names of a more contemporary texture. Similar to Hans Josephsohn, who frequently based his sculptural work on people closest to him, Tal R also cultivates a close relationship to his loved ones. We find names like Emma, Dimi, Oliver, Yunus and Rose that not only refer to family members but to a wider circle of people from various cultures, which is characteristic of our time.’
B. Nilsson, in Tal R: Vrångsidan, exh. cat., Stockholm: Artipelag, 2022, p. 126
‘The Habakuk family comprises monumental works that protrude several centimetres out into the room. They consist of many layers of paint, paper, and canvas, and are furthermore assembled from several separate vertical segments, five to nine per image. The transitions are clearly visible on the surface. This creates a dynamic effect, as if each individual element might slide under the next. The sense that the train could almost move behind itself only serves to enhance the enigmatic air and the feeling that there are more pictures, more stories hidden here. At the same time, the vertical slats indicate a rhythm in the image, a visual beat that mimics the movement of trains on the rails as they rumble across European borders and through night-dark stations, clickety-clack, clickety-clack.’
P. Albrethsen, in Tal R: Painting, Copenhagen: Strandberg Publishing, 2024, p. 346
‘“Perfect pitch” is a term used to describe someone’s ability to identify a note or to sing a note perfectly. We have no similar expression for a person’s sense for colour. […] Of course, a deeper understanding of warm and cold colours, of how colours can affect and heighten each other, can be taught and learnt. Even so, there are artists for whom colouristic aspects constitute a more firmly foundational element, where colours play a leading role in the composition. Tal R is such a painter.’
P. Albrethsen, in Tal R: Painting, Copenhagen: Strandberg Publishing, 2024, p. 70
‘In Sexshop, Tal R incorporated words into his paintings for the first time. “You have this urge to write something, but mostly you just shouldn’t. Inserting words into a painting is a very complex affair, many have slipped on that banana peel,” he warns. The words appearing in the Sexshop paintings are often place names featured prominently and centrally in the picture: Peep Show, L’Evasion, Sex Shop, Zwanglos, or Dirty Dick. Whether the text is done in saloon script, a dancing bubblegum script, flashing lightbulbs, or a rigid daddy longlegs font, it adds an element of Pop art that sends warm vibrations through the image, stirring up the cartoonish undercurrent that characterises many of the façade paintings, their composition arranged in squares, frames, and stripes.’
P. Albrethsen, in Tal R: Painting, Copenhagen: Strandberg Publishing, 2024, p. 204
‘Eventually I set myself what may be the greatest formal challenge of my artistic career: How can I paint a moon reflected in the Sortedam Lake?’
Tal R, quoted in Tal R: Painting, Copenhagen: Strandberg Publishing, 2024, p. 156
‘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
‘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’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
‘I looked at Munch’s painting and then my brain went bonkers. I counted the colours. Saying that there were seven of them is a bit of a stretch. There certainly wasn’t any pink. But I thought: “Norway must have some pink.” So I quite simply made up seven buckets – actual physical buckets of paint – deciding that if anything’s going to be red, it’s all going to be just this one red and so on. I also started working with layers of paper and with definite textures to the colours. Some of them were drawn using coloured crayons. It all gradually became more tactile and sophisticated.’
Tal R, quoted in Tal R: Painting, Copenhagen: Strandberg Publishing, 2024, p. 86
‘In 2000, 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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