Tala Madani's paintings, deadpan and brushy scenes of fictive ritual create a grotesquery populated by dichotomies. Figures simultaneously innocent and nefarious, furtive and self-aware, or comical and violent float through a hazy pastel palette that seems to shine light through the vulgar comforts of bonding. Obliquely referencing Madani's Iranian-American nationality, her work skirts formal and political lines to expose the elusive nature of creating an image. Tala Madani's work has been shown in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; MAMCO Geneva; Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, The New Museum, New York; Portikus, Frankfurt, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; MoMA PS1, New York; and Secession, Vienna, and is held in numerous public and private collections, including the Guggenheim, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; MOCA Los Angeles, and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. In 2022-23, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA exhibited Madani’s first North American survey. Madani's work will be in upcoming exhibitions at Henry Art Gallery, Seattle and Rialto6, Lisbon. Born in Tehran in 1981, Madani lives and works in Los Angeles.
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SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2022 Biscuits, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA
KM21, The Hague, Netherlands
2021 It Was as if the Shadows Were Lit Up, Longlati Foundation, Shanghai, China
One Escape at a Time, 11th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA), Seoul, South Korea
2020 Radical Figures, Painting in the New Millennium, Whitechapel Gallery, London, England
2019 Shit Moms, Secession, Vienna, Austria
Oven Light, Portikus, Frankfurt, Germany
2017 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
La Panacée – Centre de Culture Contemporaine, Montpellier, France organized by Nicolas Bourriaud
Los Angeles - A Fiction, curated by Gunnar B. Kvaran, Thierry Raspail, and Nicolas Garait-Leavenworth, Musée d'art
Contemporain de Lyon, Lyon, France
2016 First Light, co-organized by Kelly Shindler and Henriette Huldisch, Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO
First Light, curated by Henriette Huldisch, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA
2015 Get Rid of Yourself: America is Hard to See, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
2014 Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, Spain
The Great Acceleration: Art in the Anthropocene, Taipei Biennial, Taipei, Taiwan
2013 Rip Image, Moderna Museet, Malmö; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden
Tala Madani: Catherine Doctorow Prize for Contemporary Painting, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, UT
2011 The Jinn, Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Speech Matters, Danish Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy
2010 Greater New York, curated by Klaus Biesenbach, Neville Wakefield, and Connie Butler, MoMA P.S. 1, New York, NY
Touched, The 6th Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool, England
2009 The Generational: Younger Than Jesus, The New Museum, New York, NY
Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East, Saatchi Gallery, London, England
2008 ASS•AS•SIN: hashish anyone?, Lombard-Freid Projects, New York, NY
SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS
Bard Collection, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY
Hall Art Foundation, New York, NY
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA
LUMA Foundation, Zurich, Switzerland
Moderna Museet Collection, Stockholm/Malmo, Sweden
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA
Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Poland
National Gallery of Victoria, Australia
Saastamoinen Foundation Art Collection, Helsinki, Finland
Serralves Foundation, Porto, Portugal
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Tate Modern, London, England
Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY