Flight
2011
The work is displayed as part of the permanent exhibition
Painting
Oil on linen
61 × 46 × 3.5 cm
Presented as part of the D.Daskalopoulos Collection Gift
Constantly oscillating between directness and ambiguity, Tala Madani (1981, Tehran, Iran) deploys a wide-ranging artistic vocabulary that directs critique on stereotypes around social gender and sexuality. Her paintings challenge a series of western idealistic assumptions about family, childhood, but also the norms and rules of art history. However, she does not revert to any moralising deductions; instead, with both humour and empathy, she brings to the fore the power of affection investigating the social references of basic human emotions, such as anxiety, anger, fear, loneliness, frustration, abandonment, addiction, paranoia, envy and lust.
Landing or take-off? Exaltation or submersion? Excitement or desperation? Cheerleading or mourning? Creation or destruction? Whichever description one might choose, in Flight (2011), Tala Madani’s protagonists insist on dramatising the parameters of their microcosm. With the distinctive humorous and caustic sensibility that distinguishes her practice, she ensnares them – innocently and callously at the same time – into an atemporal, non-spatial reality that is well-balanced between colour and black-and-white, all the while appearing entirely pictorial and cartoonish. Her imaginative visual vocabulary shows how different the ways in which time is experienced can be. Her characters do not bear any unique traits that set them apart. Instead, they are portrayed almost abstractly, generically. Nor are the motives behind their sometimes inexplicable – often teetering between bacchanalian ecstasy and desperation – easy to discern. Still, we find ourselves in male midlife crisis territory.
Tala Madani was born in Tehran; she lives and works in Los Angeles. She moved to Oregon, USA, at the age of thirteen. She graduated from Oregon State University with a BA in political science and visual arts in 2004 and two years later completed her MFA at Yale University, specialising in painting. Recent solo shows include Biscuits, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2022); Death Fan, Kunstmuseum Den Haag (KM21), The Hague (2022); Chit Chat, Start Museum, Shanghai (2020); MAM Project 027, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2019/2020); Shit Moms, Vienna Secession, Vienna (2019/2020); Oven Light, Portikus, Frankfurt (2019); First Light, organised in collaboration with the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and MIT Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2016); Rip Image, Moderna Museet Malmö & Stockholm (2013). Group exhibitions (selection): La Morsure des Termites (The Termites’ Bites), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2023); In First Person Plural, MACRO Museum, Rome (2023); In the Heart of Another Country: The Diasporic Imagination in the Sharjah Art Foundation Collection, Deichtorhallen Hamburg (2022/2023); In a Dream You Saw a Way to Survive and You Were Full of Joy, The Contemporary Austin, Texas (2022); Anticorps, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2020); Radical Figures: painting in the New Millennium, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2020); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017); The Great Acceleration: Art in the Anthropocene, Taipei Biennial, Taipei (2014).