Gili Tal

Gili Tal
The Cascades Plus

Exhibition dates
28 November 2024 - 25 January 2025
Thursday - Saturday, 12.00 - 6.00pm

C A B I N E T
132 Tyers Street
London SE11 5HS
art@cabinet.uk.com
www.cabinet.uk.com

The Cascades was an exhibition first shown in 2020-21 at Kunstverein Braunschweig eV. It consisted of a series of pictures, now here, of a repeated motif simulating rain and stock-image style graphics. Rendered in various shades of blue and stamped with a washed out Shutterstock watermark logo, the works evoke both windows looking out and street-view sights of newly constructed buildings, and the play of light, water and shadow on glass - an effect explicitly reproduced by the aluminium cladding styles of numerous contemporary facades.The modular double-wall application of these kinds of facades are valued for their propensity for improving a building’s weather resistance while achieving immediately recognisable and distinctly contemporary designs. As such, the pictures were hung last time in irregular chequerboard overlays of the gallery walls, creating a second skin indifferent to the architecture underneath. Suspended in mid-air over windows, entrances and exits, they appeared to float.Whether or not this anti-gravity conceit could be described as any kind of pure imagistic digital transcendence, this layering effect did recall a series of browser windows left open on a screen. In part this returned the work to the the digital space where it, like the buildings, were conceived, pertaining to the relationship between the supposed charismatic authority of digital renderings of new spaces or buildings and how we experience them on the ground.

For The Cascades +, the artist has added the + sign to the title. The + sign being a lazy default in digital media branding to signify additional content as well as services which were often previously consumed for free.The + denotes that there’s something worth paying for, which makes it valuable enough to choose over Netflix, and by relying on the heft of the brand preceding it, it has the added benefit of not blowing the marketing budget explaining what it’s about. Released from their chequerboard constellations, the Rainscreen Wash pictures now accept the gallery’s architecture and enter into a more straightforward hang. A giant pixellated bus painting, similar to those shown in Tal’s recent exhibitions, You May See Butterflies: Elephant Park, Castle Square and Elephant Springs, (2023), has also been added, hovering high in the air. Plus, on the floor, there are three granite bollards, as well as a naturalistic scatter of fuzzy cut-out images. Hazy buildings, Chuppa Chup wrappers, phones and some aspects of indoor furnishings appear here and there around the gallery, like detritus, softening the edges.

- Oliver Corino, 2024

Installation view, Gili Tal, The Cascades +, Cabinet, London, 28 November 2024 - 25 January 2025
“Gili

Installation view, Gili Tal, The Cascades +, Cabinet, London, 28 November 2024 - 25 January 2025
Foreground - 20 Benefits of Engaging Streetscapes, 2024, Inkjet prints on paper, Dimensions variable
On wall - Windows (Rainscreen Wash) III, 2020, Inkjet print on canvas, 140 x 135 cm
“Gili

Installation view, Gili Tal, The Cascades +, Cabinet, London, 28 November 2024 - 25 January 2025
“Gili

Installation view, Gili Tal, The Cascades +, Cabinet, London, 28 November 2024 - 25 January 2025Buses (Diffuse Glow), 2024, Oil on canvas, 300 x 140 cm
span>
“Gili

Gili Tal
Windows (Rainscreen Wash) I, 2020
Inkjet print on canvas
140 x 135 cm

“Gili

Gili Tal
Windows (Rainscreen Wash) II, 2020
Inkjet print on canvas
140 x 135 cm

“Gili

Gili Tal
Windows (Rainscreen Wash) III, 2020
Inkjet print on canvas
140 x 135 cm

“Gili

Gili Tal
Windows (Rainscreen Wash) IV, 2020
Inkjet print on canvas
140 x 135 cm

“Gili

Gili Tal
Windows (Rainscreen Wash) V, 2020
Inkjet print on canvas
140 x 135 cm

“Gili

Gili Tal
Windows (Rainscreen Wash) VI, 2020
Inkjet print on canvas
140 x 135 cm

“Gili

Gili Tal
Windows (Rainscreen Wash) VII, 2020
Inkjet print on canvas
140 x 135 cm

“Gili

Gili Tal
Windows (Rainscreen Wash) VIII, 2020
Inkjet print on canvas
140 x 135 cm

“Gili

Gili Tal
Windows (Rainscreen Wash) IX, 2020
Inkjet print on canvas
140 x 135 cm

“Gili

Gili Tal
20 Benefits of Engaging Streetscapes, 2024
Inkjet prints on paper
Dimensions Variable

“Gili

Gili Tal
Buses (Diffuse Glow), 2024
Oil on canvas
300 x 140 cm

“Gili

Gili Tal
Buses (Diffuse Glow), 2024 (detail)
Oil on canvas
300 x 140 cm

“Gili

Gili Tal
Bollards I, 2024
Granite, wood, gouache
45 x 45 x 51.5 cm

“gilitalbutterflies”

Gili Tal
You May See Butterflies

12 February - 12 March 2022
Wednesday - Saturday, 12.00 - 6.00pm

For further information please email art@cabinet.uk.com

CABINET
132 Tyers Street
Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens
London SE11 5HS

“gilitalbutterflies”
Installation View, Gili Tal, You May See Butterflies, Cabinet, London, 12 February - 12 March 2022

“gilitalliving”
Gili Tal, Living Walls and Meadows and Living Walls, 2022, Inkjet print on paper, Artwork dimensions: 21 x 29.7 cm, Framed dimensions: 50.8 x 42.6 cm

“gilitalbutterflies”
Gili Tal, You May See Butterflies I, 2022, Oil on canvas, 70 x 30 cm

“gilitalbutterflies”
Gili Tal, You May See Butterflies II, 2022, Oil on canvas, 70 x 30 cm

“gilitalbutterflies”
Gili Tal, You May See Butterflies II, 2022, Oil on canvas, 70 x 30 cm(detail)

“gilitalbutterflies”
Gili Tal, You May See Butterflies III, 2022, Oil on canvas, 70 x 30 cm

“gilitalbutterflies”
Gili Tal, You May See Butterflies IV, 2022, Oil on canvas, 70 x 30 cm

“gilitalbutterflies”
Gili Tal, You May See Butterflies V.a, 2022, Oil on canvas, 70 x 30 cm

“gilitalbutterflies”
Gili Tal, You May See Butterflies VI, 2022, Oil on canvas, 70 x 30 cm

Gili Tal
the cascades

7 November 2020 – 14 February 2021

Kunstverein Braunschweig

Gili Tal‘s The Cascades consists of a series of digital prints on canvas effectively ‘cladding’ the inside of the Remise in an irregular chequer-board pattern. Titled Windows (Rainscreen Wash), they feature a repeated motif simulating rain and drawn in the style of stock image graphics. Rendered in shades of blue and featuring a literally washed out ‘Shutterstock’ watermark, the pictures pertain to the appearance of new builds as seen from the ground, and the perceived effects of light, water and shadow on glass – an effect itself referenced by the aluminium cladding styles of numerous contemporary facades. As such the hang unfolds in disregard to the space’s features, the pictures gliding over and in front of them instead. That this layering effect also re- calls a series of browser windows left open, and their suspension at the front of a screen, returns the work in part to the digital space where it, or indeed building facades, might be dreamt up. It asks how simulated images, and their relationship to the generic, exert an influence on both the material construction and subjective experience of the analogue world, and vice versa, and which takes primacy.

Against everyday life, a portal to another place is always enticing. Given that, the appeal of elements such as windows or shutters to various digital brands is palpable, and not least when said elements are imbued with the optimism of clarity of vision. Tal’s work is also susceptible to these thresholds, especially the draw of the virtual elsewhere. It’s just that hers tend to come with a moment of disenfranchisement that renders forward motion less smooth. In these pictures we see ‘Shutterstock’ and ‘Windows’ conflated to meet a series of inversions. The canvases bring the outside (the weather) in, and place an inside feeling (rain) on the ‘outside’ – it is splayed out all over the surface of the picture. Instead of gazing out we appear to look in. But to what? The view that these windows should be opening unto has been photographed to near oblivion. Instead of a window, and its pervasive fantasies of roaming, or indeed reflecting, our gaze is razed and bounced back. Echoing Tal’s works taking in exhibition photography and its strange relationship to solipsism, we encounter another kind of reflection where a window should be.

Gili Tal
Mastering the Nikon D750

ETH Hönggerberg, Zurich, 2019

This fall, gta exhibitions is presenting the first institutional solo show of the artist Gili Tal.

For a few years now Tal has been taking photographs in and around urban areas that to an extent, imitate what she perceived to be a certain style of ‘architectural’ photography and its vari- ous tricks and tropes. Conceived in response to an invitation to exhibit her photographs with gta, the show will comprise a series of them scaled up to become free-standing billboards that will be spread throughout the Department of Architecture’s hallways and foyers.

The photographs depict the kind of ‘moments’ of what should otherwise be everyday life, that a Time Out contractor, or equally an estate agent, might pick up on: flower markets, bustling squares, monuments to see, activities to do. In the blink of an eye, or indeed by virtue of an asymmetrical camera angle here and there and not much else, perfectly banal instances might become, it is hoped, cosmic bearers of that ever-illusive yet apparently much sought-after moment of frisson. Going by any other name this moment might be called ‘surplus value’, and, squaring up to the task of ‘leaving no stone unturned’ in the search for it, the photographs in some ways become a means for seeing how far this kind of wanton transmutation from use to exchange value can be taken in its application. Or at least this seems to be the way that park benches, hand-rails etc, somehow become embroiled in the exhausting process that is the work of soliciting endless awe. Placing blame with the bearer of such a gaze rather than its subjects, the photographs reflect the kind of ongoing processes whereby public goods or spaces are slowly denaturalised and how, once eulogised and set in this glis- tening dream world, the path towards their later dispossession might be furtively set on its way, and, in terms of plunder anyway, where this might end up.