Tal R

Tal R studied with his compatriot Erik Steffensen

Tal R, born Tal Shlomo Rosenzweig in Tel Aviv in 1967, came into the world during the turmoil of the Six-Day War to a Danish mother and a Czech father and moved to Denmark with his family six months later. There he studied at the Billedskolen in Copenhagen from 1986 to 1988; where his teachers included the artist Erik Steffensen. In 1991, he himself became a teacher at the Nut Cracker Art School in Copenhagen, a position he held until 1993, followed by studies at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, which he completed in 2000. After a short-term guest professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, he went to Mönchengladbach in 2001 on a studio fellowship, and in 2003, took up a guest professorship at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg. In 2005, Tal R took over a masterclass for painting at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where he taught until 2014.

A strictly composed art made from leftovers

Tal R describes his art with the Yiddish word Kolbojnik, which according to him refers to the shared rubbish bin in the kibbutzim, the rural communal settlements in Israel. In fact, he often borrows his motifs from everyday objects that have lost their utility value and are given a new meaning by the artist. In order to organise the diverse selection of material, he deliberately chooses a strict pictorial composition. Tal R's work contains elements from comics, television programmes and old video games. These elements are not simply copied, but adapted, transformed and edited. The artist usually finds the ‘leftovers’ that he compiles for his works in his immediate surroundings. He himself calls the search for and selection of the things in question simply ‘fishing’. In this way, the reality that surrounds him and us is scrutinised and put to the test: Is what we see really what we see - and what meaning is attached to it?

The studio as a special place of experimentation

Tal R has worked on various occasions with popular German artists such as Daniel Richter and Jonathan Meese, with whom he shares a similar understanding of art. He is also a member of the Danish artists' collective Kørners Kontor, which also includes John Kørner, Kaspar Kaum Bonnén and Kirstine Roepstorff. Tal R has received prizes and awards for his art, including the Eckersberg Medal in 2005. He lives and works in Copenhagen, where he has set up his personal studio with the evocative name Paradise. The name emphasises the artist's feeling that every workshop is a precious place, an ‘image of the brain’, where experiments take place and where trial and error is encouraged and failure is both possible and permitted. Vulnerability and failure are understood as elementary components of being an artist that make maturity and success possible in the first place.