Tal R: ‘Altstadt Girl’. By Roberta Smith.
When the Danish artist Tal R started emerging on the international scene in the early oughties, he had talent to burn and seemed to do just that, frittering it away on works that were both seductive and disposable, fun to look at and easy to forget. But over the past few years, something more fixed and solid has crept into his art. It is especially noticeable in this show of smallish, concentrated paintings of modern life. They stick with you.
Tal R leans openly on early-20th-century artists like Matisse, Dufy, Kirchner and Balthus. His subjects are a familiar convention: nude or scantily clad women in bohemian interiors, of fairly recent vintage. They smoke assiduously — note the dark pink cloud in “Rosa Smoke” — and stare at ceilings or out windows filled with cityscapes. These images possess an irreverent awareness of their own charade, descended from the noirish nudes of late Picabia and the cartoonish sexual vaudeville of William N. Copley...
