b. 1979
Tamar Halpern (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, photography, works on paper, sculpture, and silk. Their practice is rooted in photography and abstraction, engaging materiality, fragmentation, and transformation as ways of thinking through presence, memory, and perception.
Halpern received a BFA from the College of Santa Fe, NM, and an MFA from Columbia University, New York. Their work has been exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions, including presentations at The Journal Gallery (New York), Black Ball Projects (Brooklyn), Nino Mier Gallery (Los Angeles), White Columns (New York), and Office Baroque (Antwerp). Their work has been reviewed in Interview Magazine, Artforum, The New Yorker, and The New York Times.
Halpern is the founder and editor of Inside-Out: Standing in a Threshold, an ongoing curatorial and editorial project that brings together artists, writers, and thinkers through printed matter, public programs, and institutional collaborations. Recent and forthcoming presentations include Brooklyn Public Library, with additional institutional and bookstore releases forthcoming.
They are also a co-founder of Rubin-Halpern, a collaborative wearable art line with Sonja Rubin titled Folded Light, where painting and garment meet through silk, light, and process-driven construction.
Halpern lives and works in Brooklyn,
New York.
My work moves through painting, works on paper, sculpture, photography, and textiles. It is rooted in attention—how materials hold memory, how form emerges through time, how meaning reveals itself without being forced.
I work with silk, pigment, and photographic processes. Materials are collaborators rather than tools. They carry their own histories, shaped through repetition, handling, and return. I follow where they lead. Forms remain open, layered, and unresolved—more concerned with presence than resolution.
The studio is a sanctuary. A place for listening. Through sustained dialogue with materials and inner voice, unexpected paths appear. Elements recur across the work—hands, feet, photographic traces, fabric—generated within the studio and folded back into the practice over time. Often deconstructed, layered, or splayed apart, they function not as symbols but as lived moments held in suspension.
My practice is shaped by the belief that life itself is a creative process—continuous, relational, unfinished. If creativity is not a product but a condition, how do we live inside it? How do we make from within uncertainty, change, and becoming?
For me, process is inseparable from meaning. Style is not a choice but part of the subject itself. The space between layers holds both duration and stillness. Making slows the pressure to define the self, allowing identity and practice to remain in motion. The work becomes evidence—not of answers—but of attention, presence, and the ongoing act of becoming visible.