TAL R: Egyptian Boy

Image eater

Kay Heymer calls the artist TAL R an "image eater", whose new group of works with ceramic sculptures invokes numerous predecessors, such as André Derain, Alberto Giacometti, Willem de Kooning, Jean Fautrier, Hans Josephson, Georg Baselitz and Günther Förg. In their sculptures, they all explored the limits of form and the beginnings of figuration in their own unique way - and often with apparent naivety - using bodies or body parts moulded directly from the material: Derain, de Kooning, Fautrier and Förg, for example, using heads or masks; Josephson and Baselitz by means of amorphous torsos; Giacometti and again Baselitz in relation to individual hands, legs and feet. TAL R ate up this tradition as quickly as he spat it out again and, like his colleagues, he is fascinated and enthusiastic about much older sculptural traditions that are and were firmly anchored in religious and social behaviour. These include, in particular, votive offerings - body parts made to implore healing - which can be found in their hundreds, often stacked, around the world as signs of magical folk belief from the Seine in France to north-east Brazil. TAL R's sculptures, his reformulations, are at once naïve and refined, virtuoso and amateurish, reflective and undisguised, artificial and authentic, vulgar and of almost childishly pure innocence. "What more can you ask for?" Kay Heymer rightly asks!