Artwork And Paintings From Tala Madani Artist At The Saatchi Gallery
By Saatchi-Gallery
Tala Madini paints a provocative and humorous discourse on cultural and sexual identity. Picturing the male domain in all its stereotypical glory, Madini’s portraits of Middle Eastern men play out fictive rituals of a deviant, distinctly female imagination: prayer gatherings twisted into homosexual orgies, birthday parties targeted for terrorist attack, and tattoos and body hair plucking construed as the latest in ultra-macho beauty makeovers. In devising her scenes of aberrant ceremony, Madini pinpoints the very essence of frustration, fervour, and inadequacy.

Appropriating the preconceptions of racial and gender difference as a departure point into the bizarre and surreal, Madini uses her position of ‘other’ to draft her own elaborate fantasies, detailing a riotous underworld of cliquey sect-like subterfuge. The motif of the birthday cake recurs in Madini’s paintings as an emblem of masculine ego. The impotence of melting candles protracting to the ultimate conclusion of ‘blow them out/blow them up’, as pink gooey pastries become the signature trademark of her maverick suicide bombers.

BIOGRAPHY

1981
Born in Tehran, Iran

Lives and works in New Haven

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2007

Lombard-Freid Projects, New York

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2005

Green Gallery, Graduate Show, Yale

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