Tal R: Boy Looking at the Sun

Tim Van Laere Gallery Rome is pleased to present Boy Looking at the Sun. This is Tal R’s third solo show since joining the Tim Van Laere Gallery and his first show in our Roman space. In this exhibition, Tal R decided for the first time to present a combination of new paintings and sculptures.

Working across a diverse range of media including painting, drawing, print, textiles, sculpture, and furniture, Tal R questions our conceptions and presumptions about our surrounding reality. Through his own systematization of the world, with what he calls his artist mathematics, he tries to understand the physical world he sees before him and the abstract objects he knows by thought alone. When you approach the works by Tal R you will usually find something very concrete and figurative. Something you can describe to someone on the phone, using simple words. Then, at a closer look, you’ll discover something awkward—something sticky. It is as if you would walk a staircase. Suddenly there is a missing step and you are in mid-air. Something that looked playful and happy at one moment can have a weird other reading. It can turn into something disturbing, even uncanny. Like a dream, his works break down the conventional concepts of space and time and reveal certain aspects of human nature that other disciplines cannot. “That is what makes art so important for society” according to the artist, “because it is the “ghost” in the machine.”

For Boy Looking at the Sun, Tal R took inspiration from his family life, portraying his children, wife, family, and friends. Like any subject matter he approaches, he brings their representation to their essence. As the artist explained: “To draw, paint or sculpt people that you are familiar with, you have to take the familiarity away from them. It can’t stay in this private and intimate human world, but they have to become private and intimate within the universe of art, and those two worlds aren’t the same. When you create a painting or a sculpture you have to leave the human sentiment behind you. The paintings might have come in a way from our world, but they are also their own individuals. You can also see I repeat the same image in different paintings, where every painting is a new way of trying to enter the discussion of this image. And it comes from this world, the world of you and me, but you force it towards this world of being completely transformed into a painting. You only leave the title, such as Boy Looking at the Sun, so people can enter through the banality and get lost in the intimacy sphere of the painting. So you are converting it from one world to another. That’s the complicated thing about making art. That you take something that is precious in a specific way for you in one world and translate it to another world where you have to be specific and sensitive in a completely other way.”

Tal R (b. 1967. Lives and works in Copenhagen) has exhibited internationally. Institutional solo exhibitions were held at: Glyptoteket, Denmark; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; Odrupgaard, Denmark; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Netherlands; Hastings Contemporary, UK; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, USA; Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; Pinakothek der Moderne, Germany; Museum Kunstpalast, Germany; Magasin III Museum & Foundation for Contemporary Art, Sweden; Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Germany; Kunsthalle Tübingen, Germany; Holstebro Kunstmuseum, Denmark; Essl Museum, Austria; Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca, Mexico; Centro Cultural dos Correios, Brazil; Kunsthalle Mannheim, Germany; Statens Museum for Kunst, Denmark; Horsens Kunstmuseum, Denmark; Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark, among many others. Tal R’s work is included in many notable collections worldwide, including Centre Pompidou, France; Museum Kunstpalast, Germany; The Art Institute of Chicago, USA; Essl Museum, Austria; Magasin III Museum & Foundation for Contemporary Art, Sweden; Bonnefanten Museum, Holland; Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Finland, and many private collections.

Tim Van Laere Gallery Antwerp—Rome.