Victoria Miro is delighted to present Untitled Flowers, an exhibition of new paintings by Tal R. The paintings are complemented by a large-scale installation of new and recent drawings. On view in the waterside garden are a number of recent bronze sculptures by the artist.
In his work Tal R often employs apparently simple compositional devices and motifs from everyday life to create complex, atmospheric worlds that, beginning with the recognisable and known, expand or collapse into spaces of enchantment or ambiguity, heady with atmosphere and colour. For the past few years he has made paintings and drawings of flowers in vases. Each work depicts a bunch of flowers picked by the artist from around his home in the Danish countryside, presented in a vase on a tabletop within a closely cropped interior space.
Accompanying the exhibition is a free poster produced in collaboration with the artist, featuring The Garden, an essay by Hilton Als.
‘When you look at flowers on the table, you might say “beautiful”, and that’s actually quite correct. Then you are going to say a lot of different things. You are going to project all kind of emotion, intellectual ideas about vanity, death and beyond that.’ — Tal R
In this deceptively quotidian world there is a deliberate, non-hierarchical sense of things existing on the same plane. Throughout, perspectives are tilted to create an intimist space in which the seemingly everyday is served by the image’s emphatic flatness. As the artist explains, ‘You can’t say the table or the tablecloth is less important than the flowers. You have to say everything counts.’ Nonetheless, we notice how certain stems ascend buoyantly while others droop under heavy heads, how blooms become like characters within and between the works. There are definite emotional registers at play in addition to the rich chromatic ones we encounter at first sight.
Born in Tel Aviv in 1967, Tal R lives and works in Copenhagen. Institutional exhibitions in 2022 include Tal R: The Wrong Side, an exhibition of sculptures and drawings, on view at Artipelag, Stockholm (15 January–1 May 2022); and the touring group exhibition Human Conditions of Clay at John Hansard Gallery, Southampton (19 March–17 May 2022). Recently, the artist has held solo presentations at Ordrupgaard, Copenhagen, Denmark (2021); Glyptoteket, Copenhagen, Denmark (2020–2021); Magasin II, Jaffa, Israel (2019); Hastings Contemporary, Hastings, UK (2019); MOCAD, Detroit (2019). His major survey Academy of Tal R opened at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark in 2017, touring to Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Previous solo exhibitions have been staged at institutions including ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Aarhus, Denmark (2013–2014); Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2013); Kunstverein in Hamburg (2011) and Camden Arts Centre, London (2008), amongst others. Tal R held a Professorship at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 2005–2014.
His work is held in public collections including: ARKEN, Ishøj, Denmark; ARoS Århus Denmark; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, USA; Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, Netherlands; Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, New York, USA; Goetz Collection, München, Germany; Hammer Contemporary Collection, Los Angeles, USA; Kiasma, Helsinki, Finland; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Magasin III, Stockholm, Sweden; Moderne Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA.