Tala Madani (b. 1981, Tehran, Iran) makes paintings and animations whose indelible images bring together wide-ranging modes of critique, prompting reflection on gender, political authority, and questions of who and what gets represented in art. Her work is populated by mostly naked, bald, middle-aged men engaged in acts that push their bodies to their limits. Bodily fluids and beams of light emerge from their orifices, generating metaphors for the tactile expressivity of paint. In Madani’s work, slapstick humor is inseparable from violence and creation is synonymous with destruction, reflecting a complex and base vision of contemporary power imbalances of all kinds. Her approach to figuration combines the radical morphology of a modernist with a contemporary sense of sequencing, movement, and speed. Thus her work finds some of its most powerful echoes in cartoons, cinema, and other popular durational forms.
SmartSpaces presented Tala Madani’s The Dancer (2010) in the Framed: Drawings in Motion group exhibition in the windows of 200 Lafayette Street, New York City.
The artist has been the subject of solo exhibitions at a number of museums worldwide, including Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2019); Secession, Vienna (2019); Portikus, Frankfurt (2019); La Panacée, Montpellier, France (2017); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2016); Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis (2016); Nottingham Contemporary, England (2014); and Moderna Museet, Malmö and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2013). She recently participated in the 16th Istanbul Biennial: The Seventh Continent, Istanbul, Turkey (2019); Whitney Biennial 2017, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Made in L.A. 2014, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, among many other international group exhibitions. Madani’s work forms part of the permanent collections of institutions that include Moderna Museet, Stockholm and Malmö, Sweden; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Serralves Foundation, Porto, Portugal; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Modern, London; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
- Project: Framed: Drawings in Motion
- Artist Website: www.davidkordanskygallery.com/artist/tala-madani