Anton Kern Gallery is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition with Danish artist Tal R, entitled Boy Walking and Cinnamon: Sculptures and Paintings. The exhibition will consist of fifteen paintings and twelve bronze sculptures and will open September 9, running through October 24, 2020. Tal R is best known for his paintings and their exceptional display of energy and imagination in a colorful and exuberant universe. For the first time, he has also thrown himself into classical bronze sculpture. In Boy Walking and Cinnamon, the viewer can experience the artist’s motifs transformed into three dimensions—a striking parade of figures in patinated bronze. His creatures have arrived in New York with arms and legs, heads and paws, wings and shoes, beaks and eyes. Concurrent with Anton Kern’s presentation, Tal’s sculptures also make their institutional debut at the Glyptoteket in Copenhagen, in a solo exhibition entitled Animals and People on view through January 2021.
On the first and second floors, alongside the sculptures, Tal R’s paintings unfold to the viewer using a simple compositional device to create his complex, atmospheric worlds. Objects such as vases filled with flowers, small statuettes of various origins, even the occasional piece of fruit or bowl, are gathered on top of a table or a cabinet. The tabletops are tilted and flattened towards the picture plane pushing the objects right into our field of vision, turning them into protagonists of some mysterious play. A closed drawer or a keyhole may still be visible at the base of each painting; however, no legs are revealed, no further physical space is suggested. Yet, the artist keeps the right margin of his compositions free and accessible as if to invite us to carefully enter the paintings’ space. It’s a subtle invite: take it or leave it. Once you accept, you’ll find objects of ardent interest; dimly lit in dark and solemn, yet luminous, interiors, redolent of the smell of paint, varnish, and incense.
The reality of these paintings is a mythologized reality, processed by the artist, distorted and enriched by all possible references and allusions to literary works, to mythology, or to other, more exotic domains of reality. Crucially, the evocation of cinnamon, Tal R reveals, is based on a story by Polish writer Bruno Schulz entitled ”Cinnamon Shops,” published in 1934. In it, on a nightly walk, the narrator describes accidentally encountering, not a mundane spice or curiosity shop, but rather a place that is the “manifestation of the unseen… Peer through the keyhole with the utmost caution,” and you will, the narrator continues, “witness an interior monologue between the objects.”
Just as the story suggests, the light in Tal R’s paintings is muted. Perhaps it’s a winter night, quiet and cozy, with the silvery light of the moon illuminating these paintings. It surely creates a meditative mood, a pulsing of the real, “which in metaphysical moments” the viewer can “experience as the glimmer of revelation” (B. Schulz). The light hints at the possibilities of the night, an atmosphere that stimulates our inventiveness and can bewitch our imagination. Ordinary objects become charged with mystery, the marvelous becomes animated and real, and even the colors in the paintings become solids and leading players. It’s an invisible world made visible.
For further information, please visit the gallery’s website. The show runs from September 9 – October 24, 2020 at The Anton Kern Gallery 16 East 55th Street New York, NY 10022
Image: Tal R, Headless Drummer Boy, 2019, patinated bronze, 102 3/8 x 24 1/8 x 32 5/8 inches (260 x 61 x 83 cm)
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