Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris, is pleased to present domestic, a solo exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by Tal R. This is the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery, and his first in the Paris space.
Inspired by everyday scenes from the artist’s life, domestic presents a new body of oil on canvas paintings and patinated bronze sculptures, all made in 2025. Combining abstract forms and vibrant colour in his singular artistic vocabulary, Tal R holds a mirror up to his private world, distilling the essence of friends and family into portraits of uncanny familiarity. Paintings and sculptures together form a curious visual puzzle that oscillates between personal experience and universal narrative. Like reels of photographs stored as memories on our phones, Tal R’s works offer fragments and glimpses of moments suspended in time, drawn from his personal image bank. Although based on people he knows, Tal R creates different versions of his works, so that his subjects begin to shift in significance from the personal to the collective. Translated into the language of sculpture and painting, his figures find difference in repetition, moving between fact and fiction.
Among the paintings are a number of portraits of women with abstracted features in intricately patterned interiors, as in Emma Reading. Effortlessly shifting in and out of figuration, the postures and forms of such subjects, as well as the palettes and motifs, evoke the work of Edvard Munch (1863–1944) and Henri Matisse (1869–1954). In another painting, a child dressed as a cat glances down towards his feet, with furrowed brows and tousled hair. Titled Cat Costume, the composition reminds us that Tal R often paints his subjects – reading, reclining, sleeping or dancing – to the point of caricature, yet without irony. One of the interesting things for an artist, he explains, is having to develop a language for everything that exists: a nose, a haircut, a frown. In several works, including Night, Window and Gone, and Children Sleeping, the night itself becomes a source of inspiration. In the latter painting, two children lie asleep in bed, tucked in under a sheet of mottled black paint. What do these slumbering children dream of, as we observe them? What does it mean to watch someone who is elsewhere? A good artwork, Tal R believes, has many entryways and viewers.
In contrast to the pared-down backdrop in Moth, works such as Orange Room, or Reading Dostojevskij are filled with ornate detail: a bedside lamp, soft toys, cushions, animals, rugs, and blooming trees. To describe this singular lexicon, which draws from details of daily life and pop culture and rejects any hierarchy between materials and forms, Tal R often refers to the Hebrew term kolbojnik, meaning ‘the leftovers’. He frequently uses culinary metaphors, comparing his practice to the way one prepares a lunch box, or to a boiling pot into which all kinds of ingredients are thrown. Amusing, enigmatic, even surreal, these motifs – like tracks on a jukebox – are placed on the same level of importance as the subjects themselves, allowing the notion of domesticity to emerge. By examining these often-overlooked everyday moments, Tal R renders them visible. He anchors his work in the ordinary, the banal, the familiar, in order to transcend it. Through repeating the same ideas or painting the same subjects again and again, they move from the personal to the universal and enter the sphere of art.
The exhibition also features several bronze sculptures, whose curves and weighty forms draw on the same visual language as the paintings, creating a fluid back-and-forth whereby knowledge gained in one medium informs the other. As with the paintings, a posture or an expression is enough for Tal R to begin a sculpture, perhaps with even more freedom and directness than in a painting. Highly abstracted, these figures – some of which are rendered with flat torsos reminiscent of bas-reliefs – often display exaggeratedly large hands and feet. The result is elongated, gangly silhouettes, that appear at once timeless and contemporary.
Finally, as in his paintings, Tal R’s sculptures are scattered with references to his predecessors: drawings and marks are scored into the surface, in a nod to Brassaï’s (1899–1984) famous ‘Graffiti’ series. Similarly, his reactionary approach of adding and subtracting material to shape a figure, owes much to the process of Hans Josephsohn (1920–2012). An artwork, Tal R often notes, should be describable over the phone, in simple words. Yet what at first appears light or joyful often reveals an unexpected strangeness, much like in a dream, where space and time seem to bend and warp. Interested in the relationship between what exists in the world and what can be imagined, the works in domestic remind us that art, like everything else, grows out of what surrounds you.
Tal R (b. 1967, Tel Aviv) lives and works in Copenhagen. The artist's work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in institutions including Ravinen Kulturhus, Båstad (2024); Museum MORE, Gorssel (2023–2024); Moderna Museet Malmö; Palazzo Experimental, Venice (both 2023); Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg; Artipelag, Stockholm (both 2022); Ordrupgaard, Charlottenlund (2021); Glyptoteket, Copenhagen (2020); Hastings Contemporary (2019); MOCAD, Detroit (2018); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (both 2017); Institut für Modern Kunst, Nuremberg (2016); ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (both 2013); Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Museu Brasileiro da Escultura, Sāo Paulo; Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf (all 2012); Der Kunstverein, Hamburg (2011); Centro de Arte Contemporaneo, Malaga (2009); Essel Museum, Klosterneuburg (2008); BonnefantenMuseum, Maastricht; Camden Arts Centre, London; and Kunsthalle Mannheim (all 2007), among others.
Tal R’s work is in the collections of ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum; Art Institute of Chicago; Berlinische Galerie, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Berlin; The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; Kiasma, Helsinki; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf; Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, among others.
Tal R’s work will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Millesgården Museum, Stockholm, opening May 2026.
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Galerie Max Hetzler
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