There is a darkness that exists within the work of Tamir David, riddled with dim colours and distorted figures that eerily live within the canvas. This is something of a contrast to the warm and optimistic personality that I experienced when meeting David over a zoom call, where he sat crossed leg on the floor, smoking.
In our conversation, we quickly peeled back the layers behind the dark themes he often explores, from his parent's having been holocaust survivors to never feeling at home in any place where he lives - as we are speaking he is planning to move away from Tel Aviv as he does not feel it is accepting of his liberal views. We also decipher why his piece, Nobody Home, which he submitted for our virtual exhibition appeared to be (maybe only on a surface-level) a stylistic departure from the majority of his work.
Read the full interview below and head to our current virtual exhibition New Tenants to see Tamir David's art in the space.
I was reading your website and it says "you have a palpable unease with the world," where do you think this comes from?
I think it has to do with the way I was brought up. I found myself when I was a little child and I understood that my parents were both Holocaust survivors. Their post-trauma and the way it shaped their world, as a child you get used to living in a very different kind of environment and I think that always put me as a spectator. I didn't really identify with all of that because I was just a kid but I realised it's weird and I think that established that unease in me towards everything. Then I didn't feel that Israel is my culture because my father came from Romania and my mother came from Poland and I am in this country, I didn't feel like it's my home so that also creates an unease when you don't feel that patriotic.
Then I moved to Australia for another 15 years and I spend many years also in New Zealand and in India travelling the world looking for a place I feel comfortable with. It's not only about location or culture or religion, there are many layers that combine your personality and your sexual identity so that unease is within my roots. I could sense what my ancestors had and I sense myself continuing that.
Are your sources of inspiration often historical?
No, the most inspiring stuff that I see is in the streets. In Israel, there is a lot of street work that is not necessarily aesthetically pleasing but it's about what it says and it's about how it reacts. Also, these days a lot of online platforms allow access to great artists that are not in the loop of the commercial galleries.
History is a completely different thing for me, it's not really the force that inspires me but it's purely what it is, it is a reference because I believe that we are part of a much bigger cycle. In many ways, we are going through some processes that they had in the middle ages. When I'm talking about identity and hierarchy I can talk about the 17th century, the 13th century and I will use them a lot of time as references because I don't want to have direct references to something current. It's a painting, I'm not a politician; I'm not doing things just to have a say, I'm doing things to express my inner thoughts.
The piece that you submitted to us, titled Nobody Home, it seemed like a departure from some of the darker colours you often use and didn't include any figures, which are often prevalent in your work. Can you tell me more about that?
Lately, I think this is Corona-induced, I usually draw or paint a lot of people, a scene without a background. During Corona, I was suddenly seeing the streets without any people whilst the madness of the people was still very apparent, I decided to experiment with the void people leave behind them or create behind them. That morning, I didn't know what to do, I just took a couple of mushrooms and then I looked at the subject and I did all of that painting in one day just with that thought, 'what's behind those doors?' Everything is so pretty and suburban and behind it, there are great secrets, I think with the mushrooms it was much easier for me to imagine all of that.
The fact that architecturally that street could be anywhere, coupled with the fact that there is nobody there and the light that you have used, it does feel quite eerie.
It could be very innocent, it could be really early Sunday morning, nobody got to fry their bacon yet, but it could be apocalyptic and it could be that everybody is on sedatives. It could be anything. Lately, with Corona, I learnt to look at the streets in a different way and I think it slowly comes up in my art.
We have mentioned the human form and faces which often appear in your work, what draws you towards those?
When I grew up, certain influences on me were between very classic artists, like Hieronymus Bosch, that used a form and the animalistic form and the human form to describe emotional and psychological states. Later on, I was big on Egon Schiele, for example, and he did the same thing but hundreds of years later. Even though I really like abstract art, the figurative way to portray the psychological, mental and emotional, it's really strong in our culture. Through those figures, you can relate so many emotions and expressions. The form of the body really has thousands of muscles and when you go out of that and you escape from the classic view you can use it very strongly to your benefit.
Are there any artworks or artists that really influenced how you look at art?
There's one that is a painter and there is one that is a video artist that changed the way I see things, it's very important that aspect of your question.
When I was in Australia, I found out that a few blocks away from my studio was the studio for Brett Whiteley and he was a really radical kind of guy, I used to visit his studio quite often. They had a couple of videos from the 80s and I watched one of them and in them he was talking about finding the beginning of yourself and in the end he said: 'if you want to be an artist you take a brush and paper and you draw everything around you for like 2 years and one day you wake up and you draw something and you see something and that's the beginning of yourself.' When you actually look at the work and the shapes, the forms, the colours, you realise that some of them are really a common denominator with everybody else but then you realise that you have a different way of seeing the world and when you synchronise that with your ability to show it; it's really hard to explain in words but it made something click in my mind that I should stop looking outside how things should look and really be authentic to the way I perceive the world.
The second person was Bill Viola, the video artist. He talks in his work a lot about the other side, about death, the experience beyond the physical, the metaphysical and that is a big issue in my work. When I was younger and I started to do art, people thought it was a bit too hippy, the artwork was very sharp and mental and not emotional. Suddenly, there's this really ground-breaking artist and he's talking freely about the not-experienced and I thought that it's legit for me and it made me happy that I don't need to conform to what's fashionable.
You mention that you were young when you discovered these artists, how long have you been interested in art - not necessarily meaning that you were producing your own?
Since the first day that I remember I was convinced that there is nothing else for me to do in life. I got quite a lot of beatings and punishments because I was a very intelligent boy and my parents coming from their background wanted security. They said 'okay go and become and architect and then make art when you have free time get a studio in your big villa.' I had to fight the norms and fight my parents and then the institution and that's why I was self-taught from a very young age, so I took myself very seriously since then.
Are you optimistic about the future?
When you go to an amusement park and you go on the roller coaster, are you optimistic? I don't think so, I think you are just excited. I think that life is going to give us lots of those lemons, I think this year was giving us just a taste of some horrors that can and will happen to us in the future but we live in a very important era because if everything was rosy I don't know what we have to talk about. Trump was there, corona is here, wars everywhere and even in my country it's madness, I am optimistic because we are doing what we do, I am not optimistic because I think it's going to get better or anything like that.