•  Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union
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  •  Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union
    Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union
  •  Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union
    Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union
  •  Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union
    Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union
  •  Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union
    Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union
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Current Exhibition

Tala Madani EXHIBITED AT THE SAATCHI GALLERY

Seeking Cake Inside
Tala Madani
Seeking Cake Inside

2006

Oil on canvas

24 x 31 cm
Iranian-American artist Tala Madani paints a provocative and humorous discourse on cultural and sexual identity. Picturing the male domain in all its stereotypical glory, Madani’s portraits of Middle Eastern men play out fictive rituals of a deviant, distinctly female imagination: prayer gatherings twisted into homosexual orgies, birthday parties targeted for terrorist attack, and tattoos and body hair plucking construed as the latest in ultra-macho beauty makeovers. In devising her scenes of aberrant ceremony, Madani pinpoints the very essence of frustration, fervour, and inadequacy.
Fork in Tattoo
Tala Madani
Fork in Tattoo

2006

Oil on canvas

31 x 23 cm
Stylistically ranging from lush painterly expressionism to loose, almost comical line drawing, Madani conveys her politically controversial subject matter with a genuine innocence and empathy. Rendered in soft, pastel palettes, her figures are humanised with a sentimental goofiness that belies their zealous bravado. Whether engaging in torture via flatware, engaging in group grooming, or assassinating chummy rivals, Madani’s cohort are less dangerous than cringe-worthy; their fetishised violence rendered tragic and flaccid, contriving the phenomenon of male bonding an embarrassing and lovable spectacle.
Diving in Cake
Tala Madani
Diving in Cake

2006

Oil on canvas

31 x 24 cm
Appropriating the preconceptions of racial and gender difference as a departure point into the bizarre and surreal, Madani uses her position of ‘other’ to draft her own elaborate fantasies, detailing a riotous underworld of cliquey sect-like subterfuge. The motif of the birthday cake recurs in Madani’s paintings as an emblem of masculine ego. The impotence of melting candles protracting to the ultimate conclusion of ‘blow them out/blow them up’, as pink gooey pastries become the signature trademark of her maverick suicide bombers.
In Line
Tala Madani
In Line

2006

Spray paint and oil on canvas

122 x 122 cm
In Line combines Madani’s sensitive approach to drawing with the more irreverent processes of graffiti. Using spray paint as a medium of protest, Madani juxtaposes its matted aerosol texture against fluid and pluming lines of oil paint. Picturing a men’s forum where peek-a-boo party games transform into opportunities for assassination Madani renders this scene with the measured flourish of calligraphy, tempering absurdity and cartoon violence with an antiquated gracefulness.
Holy Light
Tala Madani
Holy Light

2006

Marker and oil on canvas

122 x 122 cm
Drawing from her Iranian heritage where strict social etiquette creates a division between the sexes, Madani’s paintings gleefully envision what she imagines to be the ‘goings on’ at men-only events. In Holy Light, Madani pictures an everyday prayer meeting as a ritual of a more erotic variety, as devotees cower from the golden shower of divine blessing. Drawn out with marker pen and layered with yellow paint, Madani renders this scene with minimal detail, the painting’s crude content becoming a loaded approach to formalism.
Tower Reflection

Tower Reflection (detail)

Tala Madani
Tower Reflection (and detail)

2006

Oil on canvas

183 x 396 cm
The larger Madani’s paintings, the more abstract they become. While her tiny canvases embellish scenes with engrossing detail, pieces such as Tower Reflection – which spans 4 metres – reduce her outrageous narratives to only a few brush strokes. This shift in size draws comparison between the public understanding of complicated issues of violence and cultural identity and how they become manifest in individual experience. Madani considers these different ways of working as confronting two opposing dialogues of painting. Tower Reflection addresses the incompressible scale of terror with unnerving simplicity. Set against an interior decor toned backdrop, roughly drawn squares, evocative of aeroplane or theatre seating, pile on the canvas in emergency orange. Framed by two rectangular ‘windows’ the spectacle plays out with diagrammatic accuracy of one ‘motif’ passing through the other: a physical crash, a spiritual ‘crossing over’, or the gross transformation of horror into instant replay media.
Nosefall
Tala Madani
Nosefall

2007

Oil on linen

210 x 190 cm
Madani’s Nosefall uses cartoonish exaggeration to comically devise an army of ineffectual suicide bombers. Taking ideas of macho identity to the extreme, Madani’s characters become unwittingly effeminate buffoons, undermined by their own zeal. Their prostate devotional poses ironically double as sexually submissive positions, a joke enhanced by suggestively phallic parachutes and pink mankini uniforms. Hardly the image of international threat, the entire squad is prone to high altitude nosebleeds. Madani paints this with subtle variation of style, using a combination of solid flat patterns and hurried sketching to create a sense of floating or weightlessness; the splash marks of gushing blood hint that the men have never left the ground.
Braided Beard
Tala Madani
Braided Beard

2007

Oil on canvas

36 x 28 cm
Madani’s cloistered gatherings of men are humorously imagined through an ironic portrayal of girl-culture, their clubby skullduggery emasculated against the background of female rituals such as sleepovers, spa treatments, and bake-offs. In Braided Beard Madani envisions a barber shop as a setting for camped up erotica, with a hirsute bear-type getting a pampering session he didn’t bargain for. Madani replicates this melodramatic fussiness using her loose painting style as a key component of her epicene narrative: the elaborately patterned carpet and the man’s hairy legs point to a feminine eye for detail and decoration and the hamfisted clumsiness of its male approximation.
Two Pillows and a Bolster
Tala Madani
Two Pillows and a Bolster

2007

Oil on linen

30 x 40 cm
Two Pillows and a Bolster devises a ‘slap-and-tickle’ approach to formal painting. Picturing a man lying across a bed with his unwound turban suggesting the final stages of seduction, the visual clues to his wantonness lie in the painting’s composition rather than its image: the mattress and pillows form a female torso, the man’s body creates an immodest shape and angle. Rendered in the muted tones of soft-porn, Madani’s muse resolves as a lusty wannabe centrefold, or more comically, a frustrated and repressed depiction of a quiet night in for one.
Pink Cake
Tala Madani
Pink Cake

2008

Oil on canvas

40 x 30 cm
Madani’s recurring cake motif was inspired by a child’s birthday party she witnessed in Tehran, where the festive celebrations seemed to incongruously include businessmen, a PA system and American coloured decorations. This mosh-up of signifiers suggested an interesting parallel for the act of painting itself, conceiving the canvas as a site of contradiction, invention, and fantasy. Pink Cake captures this ambience of surrealism in both its subject and style with her cake-laden brief-clad machismos elucidated by luscious and intuitional mark-making, jumbling delicate washes and fluid lines with glutinous impastos of intoxicatingly saccharine hues.
Elastic Pink
Tala Madani
Elastic Pink

2008

Oil on canvas

250 x 195 cm
As a painter, Madani has been compared to Matisse because of her use of pure colours, geometric compositions and expressive patterning. In contrast with her controversial subject matter, her large paintings are self-consciously aesthetic, borrowing from the ‘feminine’ styles and tones of printed fabrics. In Elastic Pink, her troops of parachuters are barely recognisable; instead their trademark brown and pink bodies become an abstract design focusing concentration on the painting’s construction. Each splotch of colour reverberates with energy as brush marks bleed between opaque and transparent to reveal minute details scratched into the surface. Compositionally dividing the canvas into two parts, Madani gives the impression of movement, like two panes of a comic or frames of film.
Pose
Tala Madani
Pose

2006

Oil on canvas

31 x 31 cm
In Pose Madani’s beefy terrorist strikes a classic pin-up posture, farcically boasting his recent body waxing as a hero’s survival of exquisite torture. Executed with the apocalyptic glow of sunset exotica, Madani stages his glory with a clichéd romanticism redolent of Hollywood film posters or Gauguin’s Tahitian virgins. Traces of her casual brush strokes give the scene a languid dreamy effect, her sharp dabs, replicating oozing blood and plucked hairs, punctuating the canvas’s serene surface with exaggerated cartoon severity.
Withered
Tala Madani
Withered

2006

Oil on canvas

26 x 20 cm
Madani’s Withered is from a series of paintings exploring men’s sexuality. Transplanting the metaphor of the female ‘garden’ to the realm of masculinity, Madani’s balding blokes are confounded by the flourish of greenery sprouting from their pants, only to face the further social embarrassment of botanical wilting at an inopportune moment. Similar to her cake paintings, Madani’s horticulture theme is conceived as a sub-cultural activity rife with macho-ego, sexual innuendo, and competitive violence.
Ice Cream
Tala Madani
Ice Cream

2008

Oil on canvas

195 x 240 cm
Madani’s paintings substitute slap-stick comedy for violence, drawing from the conventions of comic book illustration where hyperbolised stories and exaggerated forms become allegories for complex social issues. In Ice Cream pink and brown paint rolls down the canvas, the strawberry-chocolate colours of Neapolitan gelato conjuring Mafioso affiliation, its sickly sweet gore transforming blood bath to festive delight. Madani renders the men’s faces as drawings within a drawing, heightening the simple two dimensionality of their farcical world and making reference to both balaclavas and women’s veils.
Man In Cape
Tala Madani
Man In Cape

2008

Oil on linen

50 x 40 cm

Tala Madani's BIOGRAPHY

Born in 1981, Tehran, Iran
Lives and works in New York and Amsterdam



SOLO EXHIBITIONS


2011
Manual Man, Pilar Corrias, London, UK

2010
Pictograms, Lombard-Freid Projects, New York, NY

2009
Dazzle Men, Pilar Corrias, London, UK

2008
ASS•AS•SIN: Hashish anyone?, Lombard-Freid Projects, New York

2007
Smoke and Mirrors, Lombard-Freid Projects, New York, NY


GROUP EXHIBITIONS


2011
54th Venice Biennale, Danish Pavilion, Venice, Italy
Singapore Biennale, Open House, Singapore
Between my Head and my Hand, There is Always the Face of Death, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR

2010
Framed, Drawings in Motion, The Drawing Center, SmartSpaces, New York, NY
Greater New York, MoMA PS1, New York, NY
The Future of Tradition- The Tradition of Future 100 Years After the Exhibition ‘Masterpieces of Muhammadan Art’ in Munich, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany
Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool, UK.

2009
The Girl Effect, Lombard-Freid Projects, New York, NY
The Symbolic Efficiency of the Frame, 4th Tirana International Contemporary Art Biennial, Tirana, Albania
The Generational: Younger Than Jesus, The New Museum, NY
Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East, The Saatchi Gallery, London, UK
Out of Line, Lombard-Freid Projects, NY

2008
Works on Paper, La Maison Jaune, Patricia Low Contemporary, Gstaad, Switzerland

2007
Size Matters: XS- Recent Small Scale Paintings, Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill, NY

2005
Green Gallery, Graduate Show, Yale University

2003
Fairbanks Gallery, Senior Exhibition, Oregon State University
Studio 580, Group Show, Bend, OR