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Lot Essay
'The basis of my work is always collage' Tal R, the Israeli-born artist who now lives and works in Copenhagen has said. Executed in 2003-2004, Last Drawing before Mars is one of series of vast kaleidoscopic collage paintings made in the last decade that depict wild, crazy and colourful collaged images drawn from contemporary magazines seemingly fusing together into one vast central vortex. With titles such as Polar Grammar, Goodbye to all your Interests and here, Last Drawing before Mars, these multiple-image paintings seem to articulate the coming together of all the multifaceted information and imagery of the world into an inter-connective web and rush of abstract form and colour to suggest some kind of a hidden union between all phenomena.
In this they mimic in some respects the writings of W.G Seebald in which small mundane and even banal events and objects from the life of the narrator are frequently interlinked and shown to connect to themes and events of great magnitude from throughout the vast sweeping path of history. In Last Drawing before Mars Tal R offers a kind of visual parallel to this, presenting a time-machinelike vortex seemingly lying at the heart of a myriad of vacant and sensationalist imagery, painstakingly clipped and assembled from the plethora of popularist imagery and ephemera so redolent of today's mass-media culture.
In this they mimic in some respects the writings of W.G Seebald in which small mundane and even banal events and objects from the life of the narrator are frequently interlinked and shown to connect to themes and events of great magnitude from throughout the vast sweeping path of history. In Last Drawing before Mars Tal R offers a kind of visual parallel to this, presenting a time-machinelike vortex seemingly lying at the heart of a myriad of vacant and sensationalist imagery, painstakingly clipped and assembled from the plethora of popularist imagery and ephemera so redolent of today's mass-media culture.