I do painting a bit like people make a lunch box,' Tal R explains, ‘I constantly have this hot-pot boiling and I throw all kinds of material into it.' 'Kolbojnik', the Hebrew word for leftovers, is more than appropriate to describe his home-baked painting style: imaginary pastoral scenes based on his everyday life, rendered in guttural faux abstraction, canvases often literally collaged together like a visual goulash. Sisters of Kolbojnik, depicting an earthy gang of shaggy-haired, bell-bottomed nymphs in a magic-mushroom forest, is a celebration of overlooked wall-flower beauty, as socially inclusive as a community mural.
Tal R's Melody is like a giant Picasso drug trip. Thematically borrowing from avant-garde assemblage drawings, Tal R swaps violins, Paris café tables and newspaper clippings for rock'n'roll guitars, anthem-coloured paint and hefty sheets of canvas. Arranged in a spiralling vortex, his collage has a folksy, hippy-trippy feel about it; a crafty flashback to the sixties. Tal R paints a communal kind of abstraction, as infinitely groovy and commercial as a Beatles box set.

BIOGRAPHY

1967 tal r photo
Born in Israel
1986-1988 Billedskolen Kopenhagen
1994-2000 Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts Kopenhagen

Currently lives and works in Copenhagen

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2005 Pink, Yellow, Brown, Black, Green, White, Red Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen

2004
House of Prince Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin

2003
New Born, But Same Old Phone Number Tal Esther Gallery, Tel Aviv
Arcade BAWAG, Vienna
Lords of Kolbojnik Victoria Miro Gallery, London

2002
Ike og Ancher Horsens Kunstmuseum, Horsens
Fruitland Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach

Tal R's continuous use of a solid band across the bottom of his paintings gives citation to the framing of TV screens; the space above becomes an interchangeable place for action, where images can be substituted like channel surfing. In Fungusia, Tal R imports a trippy spiral of magic mushrooms. Hypnotically mesmerising, his suggestive forms and putrid colours play dizzying tricks of perspective, oozing sickly in their phallic reference.