Tal R’s eventually all museums will be ships, 2018, is from a suite of works on paper united by nautical imagery and shades of blue. Completed in the run-up to the artist’s important solo exhibition at Hastings Contemporary in 2019, these works respond to a coastal location and the imagery of the ship. Speaking at the time, the artist said, ‘The first thing I thought was that the ideal museum would actually be a ship. When we looked into my stores, I found that I have lots of paintings that fantasise about the sea and ships, which are going into the show. It’s a metaphor, though, about getting lost and found – I don’t actually like to be out at sea.’ The artist has often worked within sets of self-imposed limitations, in terms of composition and colour palette. His use of blue, which also united the works in his major 2018 exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, is both a simplification of his visual language and an invitation to contemplate the colour’s expansive associations.

Read The Colour Blue, Tal R’s thoughts on blue, written on the occasion of this exhibition.

Born in Tel Aviv in 1967, Tal R lives and works in Copenhagen. Recently, the artist has held solo presentations at Glyptoteket, Copenhagen, Denmark (2020–2021); Magasin II, Jaffa, Israel (2019); Hastings Contemporary, Hastings, UK (2019); MOCAD, Detroit (2019) and his major survey Academy of Tal R opened at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark in 2017, touring to Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Previous solo exhibitions have been staged at institutions including ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Aarhus, Denmark (2013–2014); Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2013); Kunstverein in Hamburg (2011) and Camden Arts Centre, London (2008), amongst others. Tal R held a Professorship at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 2005–2014.