Samiksha Jaiswal (Editor)

Tal (painting)

Updated on
Edit
Like
Comment
Share on FacebookTweet on TwitterShare on LinkedInShare on Reddit
Year
  
1999

Location
  
Private collection

Created
  
1999

Medium
  
Oil on canvas

Artist
  
Neo Rauch

Dimensions
  
200 cm × 250 cm (79 in × 98 in)

Similar
  
Reactionary Situation, Hunt, Hunter's Room, Waiting for the Barbarians

Tal wilkenfeld corner painter 3 4 2016 paste studios new york ny


Tal is a 1999 painting by the German artist Neo Rauch. It depicts two men in boxing shorts and shoes who fight each other with long sticks. In the foreground is a red, wooden manger with the word "Tal", which is German for valley.

Contents

It was sold through Christie's in New York in 2007 for USD 768,000 and in 2013 for USD 749,000.

Tal r altstadt girl at cheim read


Reception

Gregory Volk of Art in America wrote in 2010 that the setting "could be any time in Germany: the late 1990s in some outlying district, the 1960s in the workers' and peasants' DDR, the 1920s before the rise of Nazism". He wrote that this ambiguity is typical for Rauch, whose subjects "might be triggered by details in and around Leipzig, or by childhood memories and, as he has occasionally indicated, dreams, but their reach is into a collective past and toward a speculative future". Volk wrote that the two bare-chested, battling men may be "meant as an ironic send-up of the former East German government's obsession with athleticism as a symbol of socialist prowess—but then again, maybe not. You sense that these two men are destined to battle each other in this idiotic and enervated masculine ritual—or that it's their implacable duty."

References

Tal (painting) Wikipedia