London gallery Victoria Miro has opened a major exhibition of new work by the renowned Tel Aviv–born Copenhagen-based artist Tal R.Titled “Chimney school of sculpture,” the exhibition showcases Tal R’s non-hierarchical exploration of material and form through sculptures, furniture works, paintings, and works on paper.Tal R often uses the Hebrew word for leftovers (“kolbojnik”) to describe his practice of sourcing and collecting a wide range of figurative and abstract imagery from high and low culture.“I do painting a bit like people make a lunch box,” Tal R explains. “I constantly have this hot-pot boiling and I throw all kinds of material into it.”With “Chimney school of sculpture,” Tal R subverts the uniformity and repetition of contemporary society by refashioning familiar objects, materials, and motifs into items of fascination, contemplation, and disruption.Featured in the lower gallery is a disparate collection of creature-like ceramic sculptures produced by the artist using the notoriously unpredictable Raku firing process.Showing alongside the Raku works are a number of fabric-covered wood sculptures that resemble industrial chimneys yet evoke joyfulness and suggest a stranger, unfactory-like process.Also on display are a number of the artist’s “opiumbeds” – hand-made sofas covered in a patchwork of painted and dyed pieces of rugs which play with the boundary between art and life.In the upstairs floor of the gallery space is a self-contained canvas-covered corridor structure housing a series of paintings and works on paper, all depicting a closed blind.According to Victoria Miro, “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.”“Tal R | Chimney school of sculpture” is at Victoria Miro until May 30, 2015Follow @UK_ARTINFO
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