Lee Tal is a New York City / Jersey City–based artist working across sculpture, installation, and painting. His practice explores sculpture as a mediating structure between object, environment, and perception, using reflective surfaces, industrial materials, and living elements to create works that shift with light, movement, and site.
Working across polished stainless steel, aluminum, concrete, glass, soil, and plant life, Tal creates sculptures that blur the boundaries between object, image, architecture, and landscape. His public work has been presented in New York City, Manhattan, Hoboken, Philadelphia, the Dead Sea, and the UAE.
Tal has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, CICA Museum, Sejong Museum of Art, Sinaloa Museum of Art, Susquehanna Art Museum, Morris Museum, NARS Foundation, and The Hole. His works are held in private collections across the United States, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
His practice has been supported by NYFA City Artist Corps, United States Artists, CERF+, Red Bull Arts, and the MANA Contemporary Studio Program.
At the core of Tal’s work is an interest in thresholds: between painting and sculpture, surface and depth, body and landscape, interior and exterior.
Statement:
My work positions sculpture as a mediating structure between object, landscape, and perception. I approach sculpture not as an isolated form, but as a spatial condition shaped by constructed environments, natural systems, and the shifting presence of the viewer.
Early in my practice, I became interested in the threshold between disciplines, especially the moment when a surface begins to assert spatial presence and an object begins to function as an image. Over time, this inquiry expanded toward questions of environment: how sculptural forms occupy space, negotiate their surroundings, and shift perception through movement.
Across my work, industrial materials, geometric structure, and organic conditions remain in deliberate tension. In the Blooming Reflection series, polished stainless steel forms reflect architecture, sky, vegetation, and viewers, dissolving the boundary between object and environment. Repetition, geometry, and spatial restraint create situations in which perception becomes an active part of the work.
My sculptures do not resolve these systems into a single language, but hold them in relation, allowing sculpture to function as a site of mediation.