Aaaa Hit Wall
2011
The work is displayed as part of the permanent exhibition
Painting
Oil on linen
33 × 45.5 × 1.5 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.
In Aaaa Hit Wall (2011), Tala Madani deconstructs a male figure in motion with fluid, swift brushstrokes and the compositional approach of animation. The clumsy and teetering man appears to dissolve into amorphous organic forms as he collides with the wall. Within a pure painting environment, dark and austerely structured with the use of canvas and outline, the painter, combining humour and violence, addresses one of her favourite subjects: the portrayal of men in all their fragility and desperation. A hostage to Madani, trapped inside her painting composition and condemned to enact her outlandish dream scenario, her protagonist – possibly an Alpha Male? – is dismembered and disembodied into an echo of his own howl. However, Aaaa Hit Wall is not intended as a feminist manifesto of any sort. The depicted collision seems to concern conventions and the frustrations of the socialised self.
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).