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

Working across various artistic media, including painting, drawing, collage, and sculpture, Tal R deliberately avoids committing to a single aesthetic style. Instead, he engages in an eclectic exploration of form and material. Despite the diverse approaches he employs, each of his works features counter-intuitive visual boundaries, showcasing his deliberate pursuit of composition and color palette. The imaginary scenes depicting everyday life in Tal R's neo-expressionist experiments inherently connect his work to the Northern European tradition exemplified by artists such as Edvard Munch, Asger Jorn, and Georg Baselitz.

The artist himself describes his style as "Dirty Minimalism," often utilizing the term "kolbojnik" which means "leftovers" or "waste" in Yiddish. Tal R's artistic approach involves rediscovering neglected techniques and details, delving into an eclectic array of cultural practices, and repurposing them in his own creative output. His work is infused with historical and artistic references, incorporating elements of Expressionism, Fauvism, Symbolism, as well as nods to traditional Scandinavian art, Art Nouveau, Outsider art, and Naïve art.

Tal R frequently employs low-cost materials such as fountain pens, felt-tip markers, and plasticine, imbuing the appropriated images with elements of Degenerate Art. His artistic repertoire spans a wide range of techniques, encompassing both expressive and geometric abstractions, and even employing canvases that are glued together. By supplementing avant-garde stylized primitivism with his own signature techniques, Tal R captures a distinct artistic energy and complexity in his works.