Literature: Pernille Albrethsen: “Tal R - Maleri” (Tal R - Painting), Strandberg Publishing, Copenhagen 2023, mentioned p. 23 and reproduced on double page pp. 32–33. Provenance: Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin (label on the reverse). Provenance: Private collection, Denmark.

The work Wave Lamp (1999) dates from the artist’s breakthrough years, which coincided with his final year at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. At that time, painting as a medium had a marginal position on the Danish art scene, where video and installation art dominated. Pernille Albrethsen describes how, during these years, Tal R was searching for an artistic method that could allow the traditionally burdened medium of painting to embrace everyday life and reality.

This method took shape as a distinctive pictorial composition featuring a border along the bottom edge: “The border becomes a decisive device for Tal R and continues to accompany him for many years. One could also call it the ground or the foundation, but there is a point in holding on to the term ‘border’—that strip running along the edge of a tablecloth (...). Tal R himself says that ‘the border is where the dirty fingers land when you’re sitting at the table.’ It’s not only a typically Tal R turn of phrase—it’s also an exact image of the role the border plays in the early paintings (...). It’s about bringing painting down to earth by pointing out that it is also just a concrete, physical object among all the other things in the world. ‘Back then, I always went around saying that a painting is just a sheet, some sticks, and something resembling mackerel in tomato sauce in various colors,’ he says—which tells you something about the energy invested in dismantling the solemn aura surrounding painting. In that same spirit, one should understand the border, whose function is above all to remind us that a painting is also simply a piece of reality. You can see it clearly in several of the early works, for example Wave Lamp (1999), where paint from the motif above has been allowed, more or less accidentally, to run down over the border, and colorful brush dabs brighten the brown strip. All of it says: it’s just paint on canvas, where the dirty fingers land. No Painting hocus-pocus there.”

(Pernille Albrethsen, pp. 22–23)