Tal R: Altstadt Girl

Tal R

Altstadt Girl

Tal R Altstadt Girl

Cheim & Read

Cheim & Read

Gary Indiana

Tal R

Altstadt Girl

Gary Indiana CHEIM & READ

New Persian Letters (for Tal R) / Gary Indiana

Gary to his friend D______ at ***

Istanbul is a city where everything has already happened. You can be dead here, already be a ghost, knowing you have plenty of company. Three empires (if you count Rome and Byzantium separately), sixteen hundred years of keeping secrets and producing phantoms, have layered afterimages over every street, of everything that used to be there. I consider, often, that someone else, many other people, walking roughly where I’m walking, standing where I do in front of a shop window, climbing steps from one street to another (Istanbul is built on hills, everything’s a climb) had exactly the thoughts I’m having, felt the same weary curiosity at being alive, did something or other in life now long forgotten, and eventually passed to the other side. And joined a million others on the sidewalk across the street.

The modern world and the past are scrambled in a landscape of spatial eccentricities where you find a cluster of buildings from one faraway era rubbing shoulders with much earlier and later times, strange angular buildings worked into corners, wooden houses wedged into fallow slivers of residential hillsides, and somehow everything has acquired the same patina. Like a house with endless rooms and stairwells and whole annexes improvised as add-ons, the kind of impossible labyrinth of wishes and trepidation that presents itself in dreams. The streets are a maze, everywhere. Ergo, Byzantine. I get off the Metro just any place and deliberately get lost in souks and neighborhoods that might lead back to where I live, or where somebody else lives. In zones like the Spice Market and the Grand Bazaar, reality dissolves in rough patches and glowing bands of colors and crowded shapes. Everything tangible is decorated, surfaced in patterned tiles and arabesques, crowded with Arabic script; headscarves look more Carnaby Street than Islamic, women wear them with straight-leg jeans and spike heels, sometimes. The air is soft and has the sea in it, the sea of Marmara, the Bosphorus, the Golden Horn; water is always close; passages and alleys near the harbor damply echo footsteps like in Venice; in late afternoon, a hyperborean light throws a sheen of gold over the choppy water, and over the city. The seafront from the ferry appears to hover high above the water, rippling in the sun like a mirage.

There are many reasons to feel well here.

xxo Gary

from Istanbul, 2nd moon of Shawwal, 1393

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Gary to D_____ at ***

Une affinité quelconque, to put things at a proper altitude: the scuffed maroon canopy of a hammam near my flat, for example, where Simon has been going every day for his ablutions, and more. The hammam has the impress of a million bodies wilting in humidity. Later, the marble plaza in front of the Blue Mosque in the changing light of dusk. Some ancient graffiti scratched into marble balcony railings in the Hagia Sophia, probably with a nail, by Viking guards of the Byzantine Army. Kilroy was here, a thousand years ago.

This morning I read in a novel by Natsume Sōseki: “...Daisuke held that one’s natural activities constituted one’s natural purposes. A man walked because he wanted to. Then walking became his purpose.

He thought because he wanted to. Then thinking became his purpose. Just as to walk or to think for a particular purpose meant the degradation of walking and thinking, so to establish an external purpose and to act to fulfill it meant the degradation of action. Accordingly, those who used the sum of their actions as a means to an end were in effect destroying the purpose of their own existence.” A drastic way of saying that our life in the moment is enough, though as a restless person I realize malcontentedness and disappointment account for a lot of art (and suicides).

Gezi Park has survived the government’s plan to bulldoze all the trees and walkways to build an enormous Ottoman army barracks, which would have functioned as a shopping mall. Last year there were giant earth-movers, cranes, dozens of police with machine guns ringing the roped-off park; months of demos and riots held off the demolition, and now, for the moment at least, the park is open again. In Okmeydanı, though, there have been gun battles this week between police and residents about to be displaced when their houses are flattened to make way for luxury condos. Almost 400 historically listed buildings have come down along Tarlabaşı Boulevard, after mass evictions of the legal owners. The mayor wants to turn the area into “the Champs Élysées of Istanbul.” A bidonville for billionaires, no doubt.

And the Old Bazaar in the Fatih district—friends with shops there said a year ago that plans were afoot to demolish the Bazaar and use the property for a madrassa, because one had been there in the 19th century. I think they half-believed it wouldn’t happen, but I went there today: everything’s gone. The brilliant bales of silk, the rolled-up Isfahan carpets, even the massive plane tree that shaded the yard. The hoarding that masks the site shows a blueprint of a glass and steel folly of the type beloved by starchitects, routinely inflicted on American and European cities.

The kind of developments planned are a drastic break with everything around them, quite different than the temporal layering of shops and mosques and domestic architecture sedimented throughout the city.

Of course people say, Everything we think is beautiful was once considered ugly, and everything we see as ugly will be beautiful one day. But it’s not true. Ugly is ugly. If sad people later on think it’s beautiful, it’s only because what they have is uglier still. It’s a peculiar contradiction, trying to erase the near past, replace it with a past further back, but cramming it into modernist architecture. Or maybe not a contradiction. The parochial utopianism of sects and the messianic “project of modernism” don’t really have much to argue about.

All the same, it would take a very long time to evict the past from the present here. You could say that the demolition of certain places has an ideology behind it, but even though some targets are symbolically charged, like Gezi Park, with “secular” cosmopolitanism, I think it’s mainly insensible greed at work, hand in glove with fake nostalgia.

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from Istanbul, 3rd moon of Shawwal, 1393

Gary to his friend Mike, at Dorset

Today I saw the Caravaggio Beheading of St. John in the oratory of St. John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta, which is signed in the blood pouring out of St. John’s neck. You must have seen this when you were here. It’s a ghoulish painting. Why do they call it a “co-cathedral”? There is also a nearby Church of St. John Shipwreck, I think—& if he hadn’t been shipwrecked here, they wouldn’t all be Catholics.

I looked at the Phoenecian temple ruins, and the Neolithic axes in the Archaeology Museum. The early inhabitants of Malta worshipped an extremely fat goddess depicted in varying obesity over several eras of statuary.

It wasn’t clear from your e-mail, but did you have a place on Gozo you sold when Malta became tight with Gaddafi? Or did you just film Pulp there? As far as I can tell, the main island looks the same as it did in the movie—1972?—though you would probably find it very changed. I now see that half the movies about terrorists or so-called intelligence agents in Damascus or Karachi are shot here—the enclosed balconies on the second floor of all the houses are the giveaway. You might see one house like that on a street in Karachi, but not ten. Gozo is said to be still almost free of development. I notice on the map, though, there’s a theme park sort of a village on Gozo where Robert Altman filmed Popeye. Pulp should have something, too—a bronze statue of Lionel Stander or Mickey Rooney.

In Valletta today, watching people, I remembered that Giacometti tried to make sculptures of people as they looked at the moment when he recognized them from a distance, from their gait or height or the look or some gesture they made—always, if I am waiting for someone in the street, I’m interested to see how close they need to be before I think it’s them. It ought to be possible to photograph people in such a way that the bare minimum of what discloses “them” shows up in the photo—& some people who know the person will recognize her, while others won’t. (There is also that odd phenomenon, as you get older, of seeing people you mistake for people you know, who look exactly the way those people did twenty or thirty years earlier. Also: seeing people who are dead, walking around in a city, and really thinking it’s them for a heartbeat or two.

Or, when you’re on a bus, you hear a friend’s exact voice behind you, then see it’s coming from a completely unlikely individual who in no way resembles them.) It has been a long time since I described anybody’s face.

I wonder if I’m still able—was I ever?—to make a reader see the person I’m describing.

Good writers don’t spend a lot of time describing things in elaborate detail. They show you what you need to see with a sentence or two, that’s it. But you do see it—maybe not precisely what they’re trying to show, how could it be? (Language is a code, everyone decodes it differently: why I envy people who only work with images. At least everyone sees the same picture.) But you see something. Ford Madox Ford gave the advice that for a minor character to come to life, it only needs “three strokes.” (Are there “characters” in paintings, or only figures? I suppose in a painting, none of them would be minor characters.) The details are important, the figures are important, but the overall narrative is more important. If you call a novel Emma, it’s obviously about Emma. War and Peace is another story.

There is still a different sensibility in Europe than America, despite the Americanization of commerce. Differences in the kinds of stories told, and to what purposes. America hates the past and valorizes the future; it hasn’t been defeated enough, often enough, to recognize its utopian founding values and its sense of world-improving mission as transient myths that will vanish in time like everything else.

American culture is not very old, and shares the leveling impulse of Bolshevism, fetishizing the make-over, technology, and new beginnings (which can only occur after the happy ending of something else). Henry Ford said “history is bunk”—ergo the blind faith that you can demolish the internal structure of a country, disable its police and military, and democracy will spring spontaneously from the ruins, like a fruit fly. We see the ressentiment of our victims as an ignorant effusion of barbarism in the face of Enlightment values. (The Jacobins, I seem to recall, publicly beheaded 16,000 people. But they used a guillotine: that’s progress!)

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So our art is pervaded with commentary, critique, though often bedazzled by the same technical wizardry that powers consumerism. The plastic arts look back on their lineage disdainfully; since Warhol, anything hand-made looks suspicious and overemotional. We favor stark industrial design, big and gleaming and impersonal, and a notion of progress borrowed from science and technology. (Even Abstract Expressionism looks like a science project to me.) Each period makes the one before redundant, inferior to the new, like a corrected equation or a medicinal formula refined of impurities. It doesn’t encourage much subjective engagement, at least not with its materiality—it’s brainy and tight-lipped and withholding. On the other hand, sentimentality is one of American art’s main resources—& why it’s comforting to watch a Hollywood film on TV late at night. The bad finish in a lonely place, the good come to a happy end. Even American pessimism is optimistic, in one batshit fashion or another.

But that aside, the attitude to history & art history is less antagonistic in Europe, where there are many more centuries of historical residue and a more familial relationship with the past; painting, for instance, with variegated roots in art history doesn’t necessarily operate in terms of pastiche and sarcasm when it draws on these sources. It’s also something to do with emotional nuance, and the degree of feeling artists allow in their work, versus blocky statements of instructive sentiments, jokes, esoteric provocations, etc., etc. Or maybe it has to do with beauty—the beauty of an object being not considered important, or “not the important thing” about a work of art, but only an obligatory feature of the sales package—what Hans Haacke calls “the culinary element.”

But it’s important to have art that deals with reality in less abstracted and utilitarian terms, and deals with daily-ness, and history, with a modicum of unsentimental, non-confessional sincerity, that isn’t glacially distant from its audience. Something more like a poem or a novel than an essay or a treatise...

Of course I can’t defend this broad-brush distinction in a polemical way, it’s just a notion with holes in it. I like jokes, aphorisms, works that cut to the heart of the present harsh moment in my own society. And “meta-” is very much where we live now. But I’m not sure I’d want to be stranded on a deserted island with a comic, or a book of aphorisms. Or with another American, for that matter. And a good thing about islands is, once you’re on them you can forget about great issues of the moment and the madness of the day--depending how big the island is.

A soft, fine drizzle falls on St. Julian’s. It’s dark now; on the corner pavement, wet, spreading reflections, from yellow and white neon signs across the road, where people stand in a bus shelter. You can wear a thin sweater here at night but at midday the sun is so strong it turned my hair white in one afternoon.

xo G.

from St. Julian’s, Malta, 1st moon of Saphar, 1393

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Gary to L. at ****

London, etc. Montesquieu’s Persian Letters. “You have seen, my dear Mirza, how the Troglodytes perished because of their wickedness...” The Regency of Philippe d’ Orléans. ....

Sometimes the boundary between waking life and sleep is crossed many times in one night, back and forth across the twilight zone where the walls between reality and the unconscious are porous and uncertain, and don’t exist at all in places; the laws of motion and perspective are suspended, all reduces to primal wishes, fears, peculiar fragments of memory. Sometimes you wake up a little, for a second, things at the edges of perception weave themselves into the fringe of dreams you’re still having. The unaccountable elements of dreams, according to Freud, at least, are memories buried so deep we can’t recall them in a waking state. So when you forget a dream, you’ve also re-forgotten your memories. And then there are cryptic objects half-recovered by memory: doors that give no hint of what’s behind them, elusive spaces where planes don’t quite intersect. Houses with no perceptible entrance. The minutes right after you wake, when your mind scrambles to recall as many features of a dream as it can.

Poetry and painting can simulate this moment-after-waking. It’s an expression of the idea that nothing occurring in time gets completely lost: even dreams and fantasies are salvagable, though only in decaying pieces. The time they occur in is synchronous instead of chronological; it resists conscious acts of memory, which reflexively arrange events in sequence, trying to impose logical, causal order on illogical things that happened “all at once.”

Art often liberates time. All art has this possibility. Music can be a little pushy, though—sometimes it creates time, other music obliterates it. People say cinema is “like a dream,” but dreams aren’t really narratives, a fact that anyone recounting a dream trips over repeatedly.

But you can cut into time in literature, in visual art; you can have anachronisms, or show the same thing at different moments. Wherever a rupture appears in linear time and rational space, the possibility exists to free time from contingency. Time can be a flexible material.

There are two Greek words for time, chronos and kairos. Chronos is sometimes represented as a serpent with three heads—of a bull, a man, and a lion—or as Father Time, who carries a scythe, like Death.

In antiquity, Chronos was also depicted as a god who devours his children. Chronos is quantitative, forwardmoving time. It never stops or turns back: it kills us, it destroys everything we do.

Kairos is indeterminate, qualitative time: the time of opportune moments. It can mean “a moment when everything happens.” It can also mean “weather.” Kairos is pictured as a beautiful, running youth; also as a spider that weaves its web around the world. Kairos is generative, where chronos is destructive. In kairos change occurs, if the opportunity is taken. Every moment of kairos is the same moment.

Much love, Gary

from St. Julian’s, Malta, 18th moon of Saphar, 1393

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Gary to his friend R., in New York

....I went to Gozo my next to last day, thinking it would be stupid not to & took a ferry late in the afternoon, so only had about 3 hours to see things. Young Maltese couples like to have sex on the ferry at night, I discovered on the way back. I did not have time for Popeye Village. I met a lovely taxi driver who took me to “the Blue Window”—Xlendi, I think it is, cliffs of porous limestone around an inland sea.

Climbed the cliffs, saw the staggering view (awesome, we’d have called it, before that word described virtually anything), the inland sea kayaks and people fishing from rocks far below...then a fishing village, the most tranquil spot on earth.

So now this Documentary Film Festival of Lisbon, which is Simon’s thing, he covers it for some magazine. I only came because he asked me to, I had enough film festivals in my youth & this one isn’t even glamorous.

Lisbon is Pessoa-crazed, there’s even a statue of him at the cafe where he apparently spent all his time. I remember one of his poems: “I love what I see because one day/I’ll stop seeing it.” Amen.

xo Gary

from Lisbon, Portugal, the 3rd of the second moon of Jomada, 1393

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D 2014 crayon, pigment and rabbit skin glue on painted paper 15 3/8 x 11 in 39 x 28 cm

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The Shower 2014 pigment and rabbit skin glue on canvas 67 3/4 x 36 1/4 in 172 x 92 cm

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S 2014 crayon, pigment and rabbit skin glue on painted paper 15 3/4 x 11 7/8 in 40 x 30 cm

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The Dutch 2014 oil on canvas 21 5/8 x 17 3/4 in 55 x 45 cm

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m 2014 crayon, pigment and rabbit skin glue on painted paper 15 3/8 x 11 3/8 in 39 x 29 cm

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Blondie 2014 oil on canvas 38 5/8 x 26 3/4 in 98 x 68 cm

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A 2013 crayon, pigment and rabbit skin glue on painted paper 13 3/4 x 10 1/4 in 35 x 26 cm

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Altstadt Girl 2014 oil on canvas 30 3/4 x 48 in 78 x 122 cm

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E 2014 ink, pigment and rabbit skin glue painted paper 16 7/8 x 25 5/8 in 43 x 65 cm

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Maayan 2014 oil on canvas 50 x 34 5/8 in 127 x 88 cm

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D 2013 crayon, pigment and rabbit skin glue on painted paper 15 3/8 x 10 1/4 in 39 x 26 cm

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The Berlin 2014 pigment and rabbit skin glue on canvas 30 1/4 x 48 in 77 x 122 cm

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S 2014 crayon, pigment and rabbit skin glue on painted paper 12 5/8 x 11 in 32 x 28 cm

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ET 2014 oil on canvas 34 5/8 x 18 1/2 in 88 x 47 cm

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M 2014 crayon, pigment and rabbit skin glue on painted paper 15 x 10 1/4 in 38 x 26 cm

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Train Drivers Daughter 2014 oil on canvas 46 x 24 3/4 in 117 x 63 cm

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J 2013 crayon, pigment and rabbit skin glue on painted paper 12 1/4 x 10 5/8 in 31 x 27 cm

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Birdmask 2014 oil on canvas 52 x 38 1/2 in 132 x 98 cm

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M 2014 crayon, pigment and rabbit skin glue on painted paper 15 x 10 1/4 in 38 x 26 cm

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Sunday Nine 2014 oil on canvas 36 5/8 x 28 3/4 in 93 x 73 cm

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M 2014 crayon, pigment and rabbit skin glue on painted paper 11 7/8 x 9 in 30 x 23 cm

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The Yellow 2014 oil on canvas 44 1/8 x 27 1/8 in 112 x 69 cm

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n 2014 crayon, pigment and rabbit skin glue on painted paper 14 1/8 x 11 in 36 x 28 cm

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Boots in Bed 2014 oil on canvas 52 x 38 1/4 in 132 x 97 cm

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M 2014 crayon, pigment and rabbit skin glue on painted paper 13 3/4 x 8 1/4 in 35 x 21 cm

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Blue Crystal Necklace 2014 pigment and rabbit skin glue on canvas 38 5/8 x 30 3/4 in 98 x 78 cm

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J 2014 crayon, pigment and rabbit skin glue on painted paper 13 3/4 x 12 5/8 in 35 x 32 cm

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Rosa Smoke 2013 pigment and rabbit skin glue on canvas 44 x 38 1/8 in 112 x 97 cm

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14:15 2014 crayon, pigment and rabbit skin glue on painted paper 19 3/4 x 10 1/4 in 50 x 26 cm

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Susannes Arm 2014 oil on canvas 44 1/8 x 22 7/8 in 112 x 58 cm

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M 2014 crayon, pigment and rabbit skin glue on painted paper 17 3/4 x 14 1/2 in 45 x 37 cm

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Vogelmask 2014 pigment and rabbit skin glue on canvas 40 1/8 x 32 5/8 in 102 x 83 cm

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M 2014 crayon, pigment and rabbit skin glue on painted paper 15 3/8 x 10 1/4 in 39 x 26 cm

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Telephone & Mirror 2014 oil on canvas 38 1/4 x 30 3/4 in 97 x 78 cm

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N 2014 crayon, pigment and rabbit skin glue on painted paper 14 1/8 x 9 7/8 in 36 x 25 cm

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Jacobe Smoking 2013 pigment and rabbit skin glue on canvas 48 x 34 5/8 in 122 x 88 cm

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K 2014 crayon, pigment and rabbit skin glue on painted paper 18 1/8 x 12 5/8 in 46 x 32 cm

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The Drawing Class 2014 pigment, rabbit skin glue and oil on canvas 52 x 34 5/8 in 132 x 88 cm

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BIOGRAPHY Born 1967 in Tel Aviv Lives and works in Copenhagen 1994–2000 The Royale Academy, Copenhagen 1986–1988 Billedskolen, Copenhagen SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2015

Altstadt Girl, Cheim & Read, New York

2014

Walk towards hare hill, Victoria Miro Gallery, London

2013

The Virgin, ARoS Aarhus, Denmark Schneidebrett Tee Pavillion, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich The Sail Away, Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Germany Sortedam, Galleri Bo Bjerggaard, Copenhagen Egyptian Boy, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin Fog over Malia Bay, Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman, Vienna

2012

Zig Versus Zag, Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, Germany The Shlomo, Cheim & Read, New York Mann über Bord, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany Tal R, Galerie MIRO, Prague Mann über Bord, Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck, Austria Banana Beach, Gerhardsen Gerner, Oslo

2011

Mann auf Schlaf, Kunstverein Augsberg-Holbeinhaus, Germany Science Fiction, Victoria Miro Gallery, London Tal R, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin The Elephant behind the Clown, Der Kunstverein, Hamburg, Germany The Pyjamas, Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv

2010

Tal R, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin

2009

Old Confused, Magasin 3, Stockholm You laugh an ugly laugh, Kunsthalle Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany Teenager Beach, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Malaga, Spain Armes de Chine, Victoria Miro Gallery, London You laugh an ugly laugh, Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Kiel, Germany Prints, Holstebro Kunstmuseum, Holstebro, Denmark

2008

Prints, Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca, Oaxaca, Mexico Prince Fruit, Essl Museum, Klosterneuburg, Austria Flovmand, Galerie Haas, Zürich You laugh an ugly laugh, Giò Marconi, Milan Adieu Interessant, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin Masters and Method, Niels Borch Jensen, Berlin The Sum, Camden Art Center, London

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90

The Sum, Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, Holland Working hard during the day naked at night, Centro Cultural dos Correios, Rio de Janeiro

2007

The Look, Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo Working hard during the day naked at night, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo The Sum, Louisiana, Humlebæk, Denmark Tal R, Kunsthalle Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany

2006

Le peintre n´est pas là, Zach Feuer Gallery, New York Fruits, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin Gold is over, Sabine Knust, Munich Minus, Victoria Miro Gallery, London House of Prince, Gary Tatinsian Gallery Inc., Moscow Mother (with Jonathan Meese), Bortolami-Dayan, New York

2005

House of Prince, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin MOR (with Jonathan Meese), Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen Pink, Yellow, Brown ..., Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen

2004

House of Prince, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin Figur, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin Last Drawing before Mars, LFL Gallery, New York

2003

New born, but same old phone number, Tal Esther Gallery, Tel Aviv Arcade, Bawag Foundation, Vienna Lords of Kolbojnik, Victoria Miro Gallery, London

2002

Ike og Ancher, Horsens Kunstmuseum, Horsens, Denmark Fruitland, Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany

2001

Lord Madras, Hostrup-Perdersen & Johansen, Copenhagen Live at Club Sombi, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin

2000

Dinglebær, Galerie Mikael Andersen, Copenhagen El Castilio, Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Århus, Denmark FÜR IMMER, Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst (with Daniel Richter), Bremen, Germany Viva Ultra, Holstebro Kunstmuseum, Holstebro, Denmark

1999

Looket, Horsens Kunstmuseum, Horsens, Denmark Grill 48, Street Sharks, Copenhagen At the Foot of Mount Fuki, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin

1998

Bicycle Thieves (with Annika Strøm), Beret International Gallery, Chicago Basement Buffet, DCA Gallery, New York

1997

Everybody Please Go Home, Arts Center of Givat Haviva, Israel

1996

Tur retur, Galleri Cambells Occasionally, Copenhagen

1994

Sugar Paintings, Sugar Club, Copenhagen

GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2014

TILLYKKE MED FØDSELSDAGEN, ASGER JORN!, Galerie Van de Loo, Munich “ in farbe! – Figur – Landschaft – Abstraktion - ”, H2-Zentrum für Gegenwartskunst im Glaspalast, Augsburg, Germany Little Nemo, Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman, Vienna Shades of Black on White, Galleri Bo Bjerggaard, Copenhagen Front Row, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin Portray, Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp Paperworlds, me Collectors Room, Olbricht Foundation, Berlin

2013

The Age of Small Things, curated by Chuck Webster, Dodge Gallery, New York Stargazer, Sven-Harrys Konstmuseum, Stockholm La Figurazione Inevitabile, Museo Pecci, Prato, Florence Enten Eller, Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen Either Or, Haus am Waldsee, Berlin Chicken or Beef, The Hole NYC, New York Flora and Friends, Skånes Konstförening, Malmö, Sweden Flora Danica, Natural History Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen Everything and More, Tim van Laere Gallery, Antwerp Blackbooard – Art from teaching / Learning from Art, Artipelag, Gustavsberg, Sweden Paper, Saatchi Gallery, London

2012

Kids, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin Wunderkammer, Autocenter, Berlin Other Voices, Other Rooms, Avlskarl Gallery, Copenhagen Tal R, Meese og Richter, Holstebro Kunstmuseum, Holstebro, Denmark Pink Caviar, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark Rendezvous der Maler II - Malerei an der Kunstakademie Düsseldorf von 1986 bis heute, Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany BERLIN TUT GUT!, The 16th LINE GALLERY, Rostov, Russia LUBOK. Grafica contemporanea y libros de artistas de Leipzig, Museo Nacional de la Estampa, Mexico City

2011

Presentaions from the Collection: Cosima von Bonin, Per Kirkeby and Tal R, Magasin 3, Stockholm Projekt Skagen 2, Lysets Land, Skagen, Denmark From Dürer to Tal R, Statens Museum For Kunst, Copenhagen North by New York, New Nordic Art, The American-Scandinavian Foundation, New York Review / Preview II, Grieder Contemporary, Zurich LUBOK. Künstlerbücher aus Leipzig, Städtisches Kunstmuseum Spendhaus,Reutlingen, Germany

2010

In the company of Alice, Victoria Miro Gallery, London Blickkontakte. Sammlung SOR Rusche, Anhaltische Gemäldegalerie, Dessau, Germany PHYSICAL, Autocenter, Berlin Skulpturengarten Villa Schöningen, Villa Schöningen, Potsdam, Germany Thrice Upon a Time, Magasin 3, Stockholm

2009

BRANDNEU Ankäufe 2007-2008, Essl Museum, Klosterneuburg, Austria

2008

Rooming in!, Patricia Low Contemporary, Gstaad, Switzerland Schwarze Galle, roter Saft. Aspekte des Melancholischen in der Zeitgenössischen Kunst, b-05. Kunst- und

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Kulturzentrum, Montabaur, Germany Andersens Wohnung two, Andersen’s Contemporary, Berlin Penal Colony, Museum of Art Ein Harod, Ein Harod, Israel Abstrakt, Museum Moderner Kunst Kärnten, Kärnten, Austria Danskjävlar, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen

2007

xxs, Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv Effiges, Modern Art, London Return to Form, Patricia Low Contemporary, Gstaad, Switzerland Mad Love – Young Art from Danish Private Collections, ARKEN, Ishøj, Denmark Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin Köln Skulptur 4, Skulpturenpark Cologne, Germany The Believers, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, Massachusetts

2006

Naivism in Contemporary Art, ARKEN , Ishøj, Denmark MALERHJERNE! Ungt dansk maleri, ARKEN, Ishøj, Denmark Once upon a Time in the West, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin The Triumph of Painting IV, Saatchi Gallery, London

2005

Fairy Tales Forever, ARoS Aarhus, Denmark Shadow Play, Kunsthallen Brandts Klædefabrik, Odense, Denmark The Triumph of Painting. Part II, Saatchi Gallery, London Baby Shower, Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen Schnitte / Cuts, Produzentengalerie, Hamburg, Germany Imagination wird Wirklichkeit, Sammlung Goetz, Munich

2004

Helmut Federle, A Nordic View, Galerie nächst St. Stephan, Vienna Extended Painting, Victoria Miro Gallery, London New Blood, The Saatchi Gallery, London Stay Positive, Marella Arte Contemporanea, Milan Huts, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin

2003

10 års jubilæumsudstilling, Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen Go Johnny Go! The Electric Guitar - Art & Myth, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna

2002

The gallery show, Royal Academy of Arts, London Carnegie Art Award, Stockholm Ars Fennica, Henna and Pertti Niemistö Art Foundation, Helsinki Stop for a moment – Painting as Presence, Wäino Aaltonen Museum Museum of Art, Turku, Finland; traveled to ARKEN, Ishøj, Denmark

2001

Artists from Berlin, Los Angeles and New York, Victoria Miro Gallery, London Bad Touch, Lump Projects, Raleigh, North Carolina III Biennal Mercosul, Porto Alegre, Brazil Works on paper from Acconci to Zittel, Victoria Miro Gallery, London Gravures de Peintres, Nils Borch Jensen Verlag und Druck, Berlin TAKE OFF 20:01, ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Aarhus, Denmark Xanadu, Forumbox, Helsinki

2000

Organising Freedom - Nordic Art of the 90’s, Moderna Museet, Stockholm; traveled to Charlottenborg, Copenhagen

Painterly, 11th Vilnius Painting Triennial, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania Duchamp’s Suitcase, Arnolfini, Bristol, UK Fuori Uso 2000/The Bridges, Associazione Culturale Arte Nova, Pescara, Italy

1999

Cities on the Move, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark Scorpio Rising, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin Expansive og optimistike øjeblikke, Rhizom, Århus, Denmark Big Red, Galerie Mikael Andersen, København, Denmark Gallery Swap - Contemporary Fine Arts at Sadie Coles HQ, Sadie Coles HQ, London Proms IV, Kunsthallen Brandts Klædefabrik, Odense, Denmark

1998

The White Loop, Part of “Archipelago” (with Fos and Kaspar Bonnén), Søhistorisk Museum, Stockholm Momentum, Nordic Festival of Contemporary Art, Moss, Norway Couples, Galerie Mikael Andersen, Copenhagen Hvis det var dig der kom til et fremmed sted, Tombola, collaboration with Fos and Kaspar Bonnén, Aarhus Festuge, Aarhus, Denmark Carnegie Art Award – Nordic Painting, Konstakademien, Stockholm; traveled to Sophienholm, Lyngby, Denmark; Stenersenmuseet, Oslo; Helsingfors Konsthall, Helsingfors, Finland; Listasafn Islands, Reykjavik Nordic Nomads, White Columns, New York It all began in the seventies, Mishkan Le’Omanut - Museum of Art, Ein Harod, Israel

1997

90’er Modernisme, Den Frie Udstillingsbygning, Copenhagen, Denmark Frisk-o, Kørners Kontor, København, Denmark Kom Maj Du Søde Milde, Galerie Mikael Andersen, Copenhagen Louisiana udstillingen, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark

1996

Coming Up, Stalke Kunsthandel, Copenhagen Smile Now, Cry Later, Turbinehallerne, Copenhagen Update, Turbinehallerne, Copenhagen Charlottenborgs Efterarsudstilling, Det Nye Kvarter (with Fos and Kaspar Bonnén), Charlottenborg, Copenhagen

1995

The Grand Las Vegas Opening, Las Vegas, Copenhagen Maleri efter Maleri, Kastrupgårdsamlingen, Copenhagen

1992

Flag, Hollerups Kunsthandel, Copenhagen Hvis det var dig der kom til et fremmed sted, Tombola, (with Fos and Kaspar Bonnén), Aarhus Festuge, Denmark Carnegie Art Award - Nordic Painting, Konstakademien, Stockholm; traveled to Sophienholm, Lyngby; Stenersenmuseet, Oslo; Helsingin Taidehalli, Helsinki; Listasafn Islands, Reykjavik Nordic Nomads, White Columns, New York

93

SITE-SPECIFIC ART 2011

Paintings for the lecture hall, KPMG, Frederiksberg, Denmark

2009

Painting for Frederik 8.s Palæ, Amalienborg, Copenhagen

2004

Painting ”Et skib er ikke en ø” for Takkelloftets Foyer, Operaen, Copenhagen

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS ARKEN, Ishøj, Denmark ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Aarhus, Denmark Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, Holland Essl Museum, Klosterneuburg, Austria Goetz Collection, Munich Hammer Contemporary Collection, Los Angeles Holstebro Kunstmuseum, Holstebro, Denmark Horsens Kunstmuseum, Denmark Kiasma, Helsinki, Finland Kunsten, Ålborg, Denmark Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Kiel, Germany Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark Magasin 3, Stockholm me Collectors Room, Olbricht Foundation, Berlin Moderne Museet, Stockholm Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, Germany Saatchi Gallery, London Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen Trapholt, Kolding, Denmark

94

Tal R

Altstadt Girl

Design John Cheim Editor Ellen Robinson Special thanks to Adam Sheffer Photography Anders Sune Berg ŠParadis - Copenhagen Color separations Farbanalyse Portrait Noam Griegst Frontispiece: The Drawing Class 2014 pigment and rabbit glue on canvas 67 3/4 x 55 1/8 in ISBN 978-0-9914681-5-7

CHEIM & READ

Tal R

Altstadt Girl

Tal R Altstadt Girl

Cheim & Read

Cheim & Read

Gary Indiana