TOMER TAMARIN

Tomer Tamarin

Tomer Tamarin

 

A childhood filled with farm animals and pre-dawn treks though icy patches of barren pastures left a profound impression upon the young Tomer Tamarin. The easiest decision he ever made was to leave home at 15-years-old and immigrate to the United States. Accustomed to rural discomforts and the irritations of constant cold weather, being homeless in New York in the 1980’s was an easy adjustment. 

 

Though barely pubescent, Tamarin’s matted hair and precociously scruffy chin allowed him to pass as a young adult. He quickly made friends with a rough community of East Village poets who published their works in short-lived independent journals, fringe zines, and mimeographed pamphlets that they distributed at subways stations and coffee shops. One of these tawdry pamphlets became the Saint Marks Memos, the longest lasting independent poetry quarterly in the United States. Tomer Tamarin was their principle graphic designer from 1983 – 1985.

 

When Tamarind turned (legitimately) twenty, he joined the Samovar Collective, a small but influential theater company famous for introducing the works of the Ukrainian avant-garde to the North American public. It was there where he met Bohuslava Gamarnik, Zora Jabotinsky, and Yulia Zyvahlisky. He eventually went on to marry Gamarnik, a tragic misalliance that lasted barely a year, and with whom he had a daughter, the painter Sally Tamarin-Tathe.

 

Tamarin briefly changed his name to Richie Neale and it was during that period where he stole his first camera. It was a single lens reflex with a light leak that led to streaky distortions and glaring, crisscrossed flashes. In the heady downtown New York art scene of the time, his work was a major success. As Richie Neale he showed his work beside Valentin Bjog, Star Healy, Constance McClesmer, and Barry Stein in the notorious Hindenberg exhibition at Shatnez fils on Avenue B. From that early success, he went on to be represented by Furstenberg on 57^th Street.

 

Things went south after a two-year cocaine binge that cost him his career and the custody of his daughter. Luckily Tamarin had his birth name to fall back on. In one of the greatest reinvention stories of contemporary art, Tomer Tamarin reemerged as if from nowhere. He shaved his head and his beard, appeared only in dark tortoise shell sunglasses and took to wearing a silver chained Our Lady of Guadeloupe medallion around his neck. At first, only a few of his old friends recognized him.  

 

His work shifted from the Richie Neale high contrast images of leather and teacups to the poignant diptychs of the climate advocate, Tomer Tamarin.