TAL R

Working across a diverse range of media including painting, drawing, print, textiles, sculpture and furniture, Tal R questions our conceptions of and presumptions about our surrounding reality–what we’re seeing and where its meaning lies. With their flamboyant colours and exuberantly painted imagery, the paintings for which Tal R first became known give the impression of being simple, almost turning high art into child’s play. While they are certainly direct, with paint often squeezed straight from the tube, his canvases in fact wear their sophistication and intelligence lightly. Central to the work is Tal R’s profound understanding of painterly tradition which simultaneously accommodates muscular, expressive brushstrokes used to describe people, objects or places, and a stabilising pictorial format informed in part by formalist abstraction. These early paintings are divided into three horizontal bands which can be read by the viewer as levels of different activity.