In 2015 Outset Israel supported the exhibition 'Tie Break' by Tal Frank at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art. 'Tie Break' drew its inspiration from the paraphernalia of competitive sports while offering the image of an elusive parallel world. Consisting of three autonomous installations, First, Second and Third Set, 'Tie Break' encompassed a shared iconography that forms a sequence of narrative episodes in between the mundane and the fantastical.
A fictive reality, it draws on the realm of sports as a marker of a contemporary leisure culture – a repertoire of imagery that includes ping pong rackets, baseball bats, a tennis ground and more – objects that are introduced into staged sculptural mise-en-scènes evocative of natural landscapes. Yet once integrated into these new environments, these items are denied their primary functionality as sports gear; in a new narrative and formal context, there is no room for the competitiveness and rivalry of the sports from which they came. The trace of the former physical impact attached to them is re-inscribed into a new sculptural process, one where it is for the artist to set the rules and exert power.
ON VIEW: 14th February - 11th April 2015
Tal Frank (b. 1973, Tel Aviv) is a sculptor and an installation artist. In 2007 she received an MFA at Fine Art Department, Haifa University, Haifa Israel, and in 2005 her BED at Hamidrasha School of Art, Beit Berl College, Israel. Frank had solo shows at the Haifa Museum of Art and Rosenfeld Gallery, Israel, and exhibited in many group shows in Israel and abroad. She lives and works in Tel Aviv.
