Born in Tel Aviv in 1967, Tal R moved to Denmark with his family as a child. He attended Billedskolen in Copenhagen (1986–1988) and graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2000. Since 2005, he holds a Professorship at Dusseldorf Art Academy.

Working across a myriad of artistic media, including painting, drawing, collage, and sculpture, Tal R declined a commitment to a single aesthetic style in favor of eclectic exploration of the form and material. Despite the variety of their approaches, in each work he creates counter-intuitive visual boundaries, clearly pursuing a chosen composition and color palette. The imaginary scenes of everyday life captured in artist’s neo-expressionist experiments inherently link his work to the Northern European tradition of Edvard Munch, Asger Jorn and Georg Baselitz.

’I do painting a bit like people make a lunch box. I constantly have this hot-pot boiling and I throw all kinds of material into it…’ – Tal R

The artist himself describes his style as ‘Dirty Minimalism’, often using the term ‘kolbojnik’ meaning ‘leftovers’ or ‘waste’ in Yiddish. Tal R rediscovers neglected techniques and details, literally digging through an eclectic stream of cultural practices, and then recycles them into his own product. His work is always rich with historical and artistic references: the elements of Expressionism, Fauvism and Symbolism with refrains of traditional Scandinavian art, Art Nouveau, Outsider and Naïve art.

Artist often uses low-cost materials: fountain pens, felt-tip markers and plasticine, infusing the appropriated images with elements of Degenerate Art. A countless range of techniques, expressive and geometric abstractions, canvases glued together – Tal R has supplemented avant-garde stylized primitivism with his own signature techniques, that capture his artistic energy and complexity.

‘Good art has a tendency to make people quiet. Good art challenges and seduces you to listen to something you don’t understand. Good art is always in the valley and outside the valley at the same time. Good art arises from somewhere deeply subjective, but finishes objectively. Good art will break the afore mentioned rules.’ – Tal R