TAL REgyptian Boy

“Devourer of images” is what Kay Heymer calls the artist TAL R, whose new group of works with ceramic sculptures invokes numerous predecessors, such as André Derain, Alberto Giacometti, Willem de Kooning, Jean Fautrier, Hans Josephsohn, Georg Baselitz and Günther Förg. With their sculptures, all of them investigated, each in their own way – and often with apparent naivety – the limits of form and the beginnings of figuration by means of bodies or body parts modelled directly out of the material: Derain, de Kooning, Fautrier and Förg, for example, by way of heads or masks; Josephsohn and Baselitz by means of amorphous torsos; Giacometti and, again, Baselitz with regard to individual hands, legs and feet. TAL R devoured this tradition as swiftly as he spat it out again, and like his colleagues he is fascinated and enthused by far older traditions of sculpture that are, and were, firmly anchored in religious and social behaviour. Chief among these are votive offerings – body parts made in order to entreat healing, which are to be found in their hundreds, often even stacked, all over the world as signs of a magical popular faith, from the Seine in France to the north-east of Brazil. TAL R’s sculptures, his reformulations, are naïve and refined at once, virtuoso and amateurish, considered and unguarded, artificial and authentic, vulgar and of an almost childlike, pure innocence. “What more could one ask for?”, Kay Heymer rightly asks!