Tala Madani will hold a major solo show with the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis commencing January 2016.
For more than a decade, Tehran-born, Los Angeles–based artist Tala Madani has developed a signature practice centered on playful yet provocative representations of men. Her bracingly deadpan paintings, drawings, and stop-motion animations satirize conventional notions of masculinity, recasting the male figure in scenarios that mock virility and redistribute the dynamics of power. Madani’s unflinching rendering of bodily fluids and human waste encourages a larger consideration of issues related to authority, desire, and shame. In her most recent work, she adds further texture to these depictions with the introduction of iconic images from mid-century British children’s books. Madani’s presentation in CAM’s Front Room premieres a series of work that extends her recent engagement with 3D technology and indirectly explores the iconography of the smiley face, which serves as further grist for her investigation into the sociocultural roots of pervasive racial and ethnic visual stereotypes.
Tala Madani (b. 1981, Tehran, Iran) lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include Tala Madani, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK (2014) and Rip Image, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2013). Selected group exhibitions include the 2014 Taipei Biennial; Made in L.A. 2014, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2014); Where are we Now?, 5th Marrakech Biennale, Marrakech, Morocco (2014); Greater New York, PS1, New York (2010); and The Generational: Younger Than Jesus, The New Museum, New York (2009).
This exhibition is co-organized by Kelly Shindler, Associate Curator, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, and Henriette Huldish, Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.