Tal R

Tal R’s unconventional paintings, made with oil or rabbit-skin glue and pigment crayons, recall fin de siècle Europe and the avant-garde CoBrA movement of the late 1940s. Their bright, fauvist colors roil and swirl, bubbling with naïve forms and dark content. His use of figuration aims to evoke history and to provide viewers with a surrogate to experience the carnivalesque scenes he creates. This is particularly true of his character, The Shlomo, who was featured as the avatar of a cycle of paintings shown at his first solo show at Cheim & Reid in 2012. The Shlomo explored the paintings’ architectural spaces on behalf of the viewer and introduced narrative elements into an otherwise still, pensive, and ethereal world. Since the 1990s, R has shown widely and often at galleries and museums in Northern Europe and the Mediterranean.