TALA MADANI
UTAH MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART
OCTOBER 4, 2013 - JANUARY 4, 2014
A survey of animated paintings by the 2013 winner of the Catherine Doctorow Prize for Contemporary Painting.
For this exhibition, UMOCA presents the first museum survey of Madani’s animations. These silent and humorous cartoons are an extension of the artist’s painterly style, as the comical scenes are rendered in the same quick bold brush strokes that characterize Madani’s oil on canvas works. Much like her paintings, Madani’s animations playfully deconstruct western assumptions revolving around primal obsessions, male violence and xenophobia in order to facilitate a broader dialogue about the power of the image in today’s increasingly globalized society.
Madani’s work plays with explicit and implicit visual language to discuss global concerns about racial and gender differences. The oscillation between figuration and abstraction in her work demonstrates the contrast between comedy and seriousness, fantasy and reality as well as tolerance and taboo. Her figures continually morph from bumbling male bodies into abstract shapes and forms that resemble biological processes and linguistic arrangements.
These themes of corporeality and etymology express the complexity of social pathos and reveal unconventional channels for reflection and contemplation. In this way, her work stages a feminist critique of an omnipotent patriarchy through a symbolic language that undermines our expectations and challenges the woes of insular thinking.
