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Tal R | Chimney school of sculpture

23 April - 30 May 2015
Victoria Miro, 16 Wharf Road, London N1 7RW

Victoria Miro is delighted to present Chimney school of sculpture, an exhibition of new work by the Copenhagen-based artist Tal R.

Tal R has often used the word 'kolbojnik', meaning leftovers in Hebrew, to describe his practice of sourcing and collecting a wide range of imagery, figurative and abstract, from high and low culture. Installed collectively, Tal R's works can give the impression of a group show, as adherence to a single aesthetic style is eschewed in favour of a non-hierarchical exploration of material and form. This will be explored in the exhibition, which stages sculptures alongside furniture works and a series of paintings and works on paper.

The lower gallery will be populated by a disparate collection of ceramic, creature-like sculptures. Tal R has employed a process of Raku firing, an ancient technique which originated in sixteenth-century Japan. The process produces notoriously unpredictable results - the clay's surface is blackened or whitened according to the intensity of its exposure to the smoke and is liable to crack or even explode, a volatility that has drawn the artist to the material.

Alongside the Raku sculptures will be a number of minimalist sculptures of fabric-covered wood. These larger-than-life flumes, with candy-cane stripes and built-in air vents, call to mind to the industrial chimney. However, these works are divorced from any functioning system. Instead they suggest a joyfulness that rebukes a factory logic of inputs and outputs, and embody a stranger and less quantifiable process.

Tal R is also known for producing unique, hand-made sofas, or 'opiumbeds', which are made from old and new rugs sourced throughout Scandinavia and treated with paint and dye in the studio. A number of these patchworked pieces of furniture will provide another perspective from which to view - or from which to be viewed by - the sculptures. Exploring the domestic quality of furniture as an artistic medium, Tal R plays with the boundary between art and life. Neither the practical purpose of these works nor their aesthetic qualities take categorical precedence. The idea of the opium bed suggests a hazy, latent space of unfettered thinking, the functional object delineating a non-functional space of thought. 

The upstairs floor of the gallery space will be taken up with a self-contained corridor structure stretched over with canvas material. Within it are paintings and works on paper, all depicting a closed blind. Repeated across the walls of an enclosed space, this representation of shuttered vision conveys a visceral sense of interiority and positions the viewer in an ambiguous space that is neither inside nor outside.


Biographical details:

Born in Tel Aviv in 1967, Tal R lives and works in Copenhagen. He has had solo exhibitions at ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Arhus, Denmark (2013 - 2014); Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2013); Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck, Austria, travelling to Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (both 2013); Museu Brasileiro da Escultura, São Paulo (2012); Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf (2012); Kunstverein Augsburg-Holbeinhaus, Augsburg, Germany (2011); Der Kunstverein, Hamburg (2011); Magasin III Museum & Foundation for Contemporary Art, Stockholm (2009); Kunsthalle Tübingen, Tübingen (2009); Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht (2008); Camden Arts Centre, London (2008); Louisiana Museum for Moderne Kunst, Denmark (2007); and Kunsthalle Mannheim (2007). Tal R was a professor at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 2005 - 2014.


For further press information please contact:

Victoria Miro:
Emily Summerscale | [email protected] | + 44 (0) 20 7549 0491
Kathy Stephenson | [email protected]

Rees & Company:
Carrie Rees | [email protected] | + 44 (0) 77 63 70 83 46
Chloe Nahum | [email protected] | + 44 (0) 77 42 23 91 78