Overview
Pilar Corrias is pleased to present Abstract Pussy, Tala Madani's third solo exhibition with the gallery featuring a new set of paintings.
Follow the sign…
Keep in line-be careful not to slip.
Tala Madani's paintings confront and challenge our very constitution. The characters she depicts, distinctively middle-aged men, do not self-censor their behaviour and their actions jostle with conventional distinctions of what is socially and publicly acceptable. Through her fleshy and intimate mark making Madani presents us with a condensed, and yet darkly comic, read of the obstructions and promises of power, exchange, and influence.
Abstract Pussy (2013) and 3D Pussy (2013) form two central paintings to Madani's exhibition. Both feature a highly illustrated young girl whose silkscreened image dominates both the space and Madani's men who occupy it with her. In Abstract Pussy the shadowy, loosely painted men huddle under the girl's skirt-looking and crawling towards the purple light emanating underneath. One man guides the others on their inspection wielding a Kandinsky-esque abstract painting sign. 3D Pussy pushes the linear illustrative qualities of the girl from Abstract Pussy one step further. The girl is structured more as an image through the play on 3D lines, and she is considerably separated from the men taking a commanding position in front of them. The relationship between the girl and the men, watching her through the mediation of 3D glasses, plays on the intangibility of painting and the desire for the things depicted to become three-dimensional.
In other paintings Madani has introduced a new set of protagonists-two children named Peter and Jane. The dominant characters recall the children from the book series Key Words Reading Scheme, published by Ladybird Books in the 1960s. Colloquially referred to as the Peter and Jane books, the stories placed the children in easily recognisable situations and used rote repetition to teach readers common words used in everyday English language. Madani reconfigures Peter and Jane's illustrative scenes by introducing her men into their idealistic landscape. Madani's men add an element of humour to the scenes, almost mocking the children with their idiosyncratic behaviour.
Tala Madani (b. 1981 in Tehran, Iran) lives and works in Los Angeles. Madani currently has a large solo exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary, her first at a UK institution. Recent solo exhibitions of her work include: Tala Madani: Rip Image, Moderna Museet, Malmö; Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2013); Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City (2013); Tala Madani: The Jinn, Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam (2011). Recent group exhibitions include: PLAY! Recapturing the Radical Imagination, Göteborg Biennial (2013); The Future Generation Art Prize@Venice 2013, Palazzo Contarini Polignac, Venice (2013); New works 13.1, Artpace, San Antonio (2013); No Borders, Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, Bristol (2013); He disappeared into complete silence; rereading a single artwork by Louise Bourgeois, Museum De Hallen, Amsterdam (2011); Speech Matters, Danish Pavilion at the 54th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venice (2011); The Great New York, P.S. 1 MoMA, New York (2010).
