London, Victoria Miro Gallery, The Lords of Kolbojnik, May 17 - June 14, 2003
Literature
Victoria Miro Gallery, ed., The Lords of Kolbojnik, London, 2003 (illustrated)
Catalogue Essay
Tal R’s paintings draw on our prior knowledge of the Avant-garde and art developments of the past few decades. This collusion enables the artist to avoid both excessive sophistication and the calculated unconscious of the primitive. It is as if the infantile were a protective mechanism behind which he creates a secretive, often very gloomy pictorial world, full of hidden messages. Playmobil and Duplo, as Hans Werner Schmidt once commented, are one side of this. I myself would add the early Nintendo games with Supermario, in which evil came skipping onto the screen looking completely innocuous at first. Supermario and the similarly superficial games of the 1980s had a bar at the top of the screen in which points were collected and another at the bottom which formed a gateway to the void—rather like the Sephiroth in the Kabbalah. V. Loers, “Slutspil,” Tal R: fruitland, Mönchengladbach, 2002, n.p.
2002 Oil paint, crayon, paper, pasteboard on canvas. 98 1/2 x 98 1/2 in. (250 x 250 cm). Signed, titled and dated “Tal R ‘Fungasia’ 2002” on the reverse.