Galerie im Taxispalais

TAL R

Mann über Bord (Man Overboard)

The Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck shows an extensive exhibition of work by the Danish artist Tal R. He has been creating an intense and exceptional oeuvre since the late 1990s, which has won international acclaim. Tal R recycles classical painting, creating an unusual and complex pictorial language by combining a mix of styles and contexts using a collagelike method. His oeuvre comprises painting, drawing, collage and sculpture as well as films and fashion design. In terms of content and form he refers to elements of popular and underground culture as well as to the everyday world. The Mann über Bord (Man Overboard) show, devised for Innsbruck and Düsseldorf, ranges from very early drawings and collages that have never been shown before via major, familiar work complexes to the most recent sculptures and paintings that are being presented for the first time

A special dramaturgy for the exhibition, designed by Tal R, creates links in terms of both form and content between the individual working phases and work complexes. His works are placed in new relationships with each other that can be experienced visually by means of island-like platforms. Plinths and mobile screens act as supports for densely packed, patchwork-like juxtapositions of drawings, small paintings and sculptures, of collages and textile works that explore both the form and content of his work and create an exuberant, magnificently colourful three-dimensional collage. The seven islands on which Tal R has set up his exhibition merge with each other. They suggest the motifs of travel, sailing from place to place, from thought to thought, form work to work. The exhibition invites visitors to travel round the world, the world being Tal R’s pictorial cosmos, who again feeds on the images and themes of our globalized present. Each of the island focuses on a theme that is reflected in the works collected around it. One of these “islands”, called Fog over Malia Bay, is devoted to Tal R’s most recent works, which came into being in connection with landscape experiences during his expedition to Greenland in August 2011. Another island uses old and new works on paper and also small paintings to address figuration and its narrative potential. Other key points in the presentation are new, ornamentally based works on paper; early, brittle collages; minimalistic, abstract images; monochromatic textile works and collaged objects and also records of his long-standing performative collaboration with the Copenhagen fashion label “Moonspoon Saloon”.

This exhibition, the first to present the full range of Tal R’s work in Austria, does not follow any particular chronology but rather shows how he worked out various strands of his work intuitively at a very early stage, then pursued and modified them over the years. Swinging between enjoyable anarchy, humorous, ironic references, overkill in terms of information, and strict order, he draws the contemporary world with all its questions and problems into his elaborate, sometimes seemingly lyrical cosmos and involves it in a comprehensive discourse about art.

In cooperation with the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (7 July – 9 September 2012)

Tal R
1967 born in Tel Aviv, Israel, lives and works in Copenhagen
1994 - 2000 Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen
1986 - 1988 Billedskolen, Copenhagen
since 2008 Professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf

Selected solo exhibitions:
2011 Tal R – Science Fiction, Victoria Miro Gallery, London
2011 The Elephant behind the Clown, Der Kunstverein Hamburg
2011 The Pyjamas, Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel
2010 Tal R, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin
2009 Old Confused, Magasin 3, Stockholm
2009 Teenager Beach, CAC Malaga, Malaga
2009 You Laugh an Ugly Laugh, Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Kiel; Kunsthalle Tübingen, Tübingen
2008 Adieu Interessant, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin
2008 Prince Fruit, Essl Museum, Klosterneuburg
2007 The Sum, Louisiana, Humlebæk
2005 House of Prince, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin; Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman, Innsbruck