Tal R: Chimney school of sculpture

Alongside the Raku sculptures are a number of minimalist sculptures of fabric-covered wood. These larger-than-life flumes, with candy-cane stripes and built-in air vents, call to mind to the industrial chimney. However, these works are divorced from any functioning system. Instead they suggest a joyfulness that rebukes a factory logic of inputs and outputs, and embody a stranger and less quantifiable process.

Tal R is also known for producing unique, hand-made sofas, or ‘opiumbeds’, which are made from old and new rugs sourced throughout Scandinavia and treated with paint and dye in the studio. A number of these patchworked pieces of furniture provide another perspective from which to view – or from which to be viewed by – the sculptures. Exploring the domestic quality of furniture as an artistic medium, Tal R plays with the boundary between art and life. Neither the practical purpose of these works nor their aesthetic qualities take categorical precedence. The idea of the opium bed suggests a hazy, latent space of unfettered thinking, the functional object delineating a non-functional space of thought.

The upstairs floor of the gallery space is taken up with a self-contained corridor structure stretched over with canvas material. Within it are paintings and works on paper, all depicting a closed blind. Repeated across the walls of an enclosed space, 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.