“The real rock and roll is having a family”: Tour Copenhagen's coolest apartment

“Everything is chaos,” Emma Rosenzweig exclaims as we walk down the street with her husband Tal Rosenzweig and their very sweet, sleeping baby Ariel. Attractive, enigmatic, and wildly successful across multiple disciplines, the Rosenzweigs are practically the first family of Danish cool. We meet to discuss the couple’s home life as well as their distinct creative practices, but I immediately sense that the split between life and work may not be so clear.

Emma is a writer and filmmaker, currently studying at the art school Städelschule in Frankfurt. Tal, who goes by Tal R professionally, is one of Denmark ’s most noteworthy contemporary artists, having shown at institutions such as the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, Artipelag in Stockholm and Anton Kern in New York. Together with their two sons, the couple have cultivated a life much less ordinary. Still, it ’s a life that
carries the tropes of a family figuring out their work and home groove.

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“Yesterday we had this conversation that we are so under pressure – let’s be nice to each other,” Emma says, smiling. “We need to be kind and generous to one another. We need to have more kindness than war.” It sounds straightforward enough, but it’s a complex issue when there are not “the typical borders around your work day”. As Emma puts it, “everything is negotiable”. “For all you people dealing with a nine-to-five job out there, feel lucky.”

Tal is quick to add that an uncertain schedule is unavoidable for an artist. “You can compare working with art to dreaming,” he says. “Could you put dreaming in a nine-to-five schedule?” Still, developing as an artist means “finding our method, finding your rhythm”. “What happens when you have potatoes and you don’t pick them? They turn into a flower,” he says. “It’s the same with your work. You need deadlines. If you don’t then it just grows and never really ends.”

In addition to their Copenhagen home, which they moved into three years ago, Tal and Emma both have their own studio spaces, with Tal’s located steps below the family apartment and Emma’s also close by. Emma’s studio, which she shares with three painters, is humble in size – all she really needs is a computer to write or edit her films – yet it carries a massive significance. “As a woman, especially, it ’s super important to leave your home. If you don’t, all the things that surround you in the home will stay with you,” she says. On the short walk to her studio, Emma crosses a bridge, an act she sees as a sort of ritual.

Tal’s studio, on the other hand, is enormous, spanning the same floor space as their house above but comprising of one almighty room. Unlike their home, which carries a warmth and cosiness despite its size, the studio is bright and open. Magnificent canvases lean confidently against the walls, painted in deep, brown reds, eggy yellows, darkened greens and his soft, musky pink.

There is a sense of order to the space, from the sketches stacked against one another, the works in progress drying in lanes on raised supports and bowls filled with mixed paints covering tables constructed from palettes. Entering the space you’re greeted by the artist’s “opiumbed”, a massive sofa-sculpture rendered in signature Tal pink.

Emma is the type of person who cannot sit still, both physically and intellectually. She philosophises in a sort of stream of consciousness; a response to her years as a successful model. “I have been doing interviews for so long about nothing, about being on the cover of a magazine, and it felt stupid,” she says. “I am now focusing on creating and writing things myself and making films. I love doing this, it makes me happy.” She is hardly the first in her family to pick up the camera; her grandfather, Jørgen Leth, is a pioneer of experimental Danish documentary and art film.

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Though she seems to carry a complex relationship with modelling, she was a far cry from a blank canvas. Rather, she was a fashion world muse, with both her striking elfin appearance and effortless sense of style serving as inspiration. She has walked internationally for the likes of Balenciaga as well as for Ganni and Saks Potts closer to home. Today, she pursues a different viewpoint. “Being drawn by someone and being that ‘muse’ is not someone I see myself as,” she says. “But being with someone that is serious about his work drives me to be the same.”

That doesn’t stop Tal from drawing pictures of Emma – he’s been drawing her for the seven years they’ve been a couple. But over the years, the relationship between artist and muse has become more complicated. “I feel more and more confused in this situation, because I understand that in the male gaze lies its own contradiction,” he says. “So it is like going from feeling like a boy with pencils I feel like a boy with matches now. Emma now looks at me with a different eye now when I draw her, which is why I feel the matches now and not the pencils.”

Emma laughs at the analogy and adds: “For me the interesting thing about being drawn is that it is really different than being photographed. Because most of the time, it didn’t look like me, which is part of what I like about it when Tal draws me.” Emma likens the experience of being drawn by her husband to planning out an outfit and thinking to oneself, “What character do I want to be today?” “It is always the same when Tal is drawing me. I am waiting to see what character he has made me into. It has always been the same for me – it is your eyes looking at me.” She points out that what’s missing when men portray women in this way is what the women themselves are thinking.

After she had her first son, Emma applied to the art academy Städelschule in Frankfurt without telling anyone. She was accepted, commencing a twice monthly commute to Germany. “As a mother and being with a man that takes a lot of space, it is a great way to remove yourself,” she says. “It is a double life, as suddenly you are now an art student, you are not a mother.” She describes a common conundrum of being a mother – of dreaming of freedom from her children yet missing them terribly the moment she leaves them. “Before we had our first son, I was just like a cloud up in the air: wherever the wind would take me I would blow,” she says. “It was very different.”

Tal, in turn, has made adjustments to accommodate his growing family. “Before I used to move more between work and home; now the moment I leave the studio I don’t go back down until morning. Mentally I am always there, but physically not,” he says, adding, “Forget about night life – the real rock and roll is having a family. There are so many challenges to make it happen.”

The stairwell to Emma and Tal’s apartment is a warm yellow, visible in spurts through the breaks between frames of varied works on canvas and paper. Among them is a series of posters Tal created for a film club Emma curated at Kunsthal Charlottenborg – imagined graphics for Susperia and Cape Fear. Otherwise, nearly all of the artwork is created by others. “I actually don’t like to look at my own work at home,” says Tal. “It always makes me think and my mind starts drifting.

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What did they want from their home when they moved in? For Emma, it was an “open space”. “We cook so much, we make so much food, and I wanted to be able to cook while looking at everyone, which is why the room out there is so big,” she says. Tal compares the structure of the home to that of a ship upside down – the ribs being the overhead beams that cross into every room. Each room rolls into another, with no skirting board breaking the floor. Kids can wheel their little bikes and prams freely throughout the space. Emma’s dream open kitchen constitutes a huge countertop, a generous dining table surrounded by Arne Jacobsen chairs and one of Tal’s wide sofas, upholstered with collected rag rugs dyed a variety of colours.

Carpets of all manners and forms flock the shining floorboards, leading to little nooks or spaces for sitting, thinking and reading – an armchair and footstool set towards a window, a chair hammock by the piano. Amidst it all, lies artefact on art on art on artefact. On every exposed wall, in cupboards, on shelves, atop tables, there are pieces that inflect the space with a keen sense of the homeowners. Even the central beams of the property are wrapped in little cut-out pictures by Tal and Emma’s son.

“Tal and I didn’t come from privileged families that had the privileged lives that we do now. That is an important thing to say because I never dreamed of growing up in a place like this,” says Emma. “Tal is the reason this home is so colourful. He is so good at decorating and I am the person that puts the flowers on the table and lights the candles and puts the conversations into the room.” She notes that they both have big families, and wanted a home large enough to gather everyone. “I have five children, there are a lot of different links,” says Tal. “Emma is really the glue and that makes this happen.”

Though they have their separate studios, they spend quite a bit of time in the space. “Having children roots you,” Tal says. “We do spend so much time here, and we could spend all our time here, actually. It’s funny, as we have so much to do all the time, we have travels to do, plans, this person is talking here, that person is talking there, and what we need to do is remind ourselves that what we love is when we have no plans.”

I notice a record player and a stack of vinyl on the sideboard facing the dining table and ask if music is something that’s ever-present for the Rosenzweigs. “Yes – all the time,” they say in unison. “We dance a lot, too,” Emma says. “It is like a collective therapy session. We all put on the Danish artist Gilli and dance.” Tal smiles and adds: “Real rock and roll is having no plans.”