Biography of Tal R
Globally recognized for his vibrant and dramatic use of color and various explorations of drawing, collage, sculpture, and painting, Tal R has been compared to the likes of Matisse and Bonnard. For Tal R, however, medium is secondary to subject matter. Not one to confine himself to a single style, the artist is constantly experimenting with materials and techniques. He has used the word "kolbojnik", meaning leftovers in Hebrew, to describe his practice of using found imagery from contemporary culture and society in his works.
Of Danish-Israeli descent, Tal R was born in 1967 and is an artist caught between two cultures, his mother's Scandinavian heritage contrasting strongly with his Jewish father who hailed from Czechoslovakia and was a survivor of the Holocaust. This duality proved to be fertile ground for Tal R's later artistic explorations, where he merges very different influences and styles, fusing Fauvism and Expressionism with children's and outsider art. "I do painting a bit like people make a lunch box, I constantly have this hot-pot boiling and I throw all kinds of material into it", the artist observes.
Tal R's work is shown in such celebrated institutions as the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, and the ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Aarhus, Denmark. He is also the winner of the prestigious international Carnegie Art Award the Danish Eckersberg Medal in 2004. Tal R is a guest professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.
