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Collage of five diverse artworks from the Hammer Museum Collections side by side. From left to right: 1) Contemporary painting of two embracing figures with surreal elements. 2) Post-impressionist style painting of trees with vibrant blues and greens. 3) Black and white illustration of a face with intricate patterns. 4) Japanese woodblock print style image of a figure in a checkered robe. 5) Photograph of a couple dancing, the woman in a black dress and the man in white

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Tala Madani

Back to Made in L.A. 2014
Interview with Frieze
“The Dancer” Video

More Resources

About the Artist

Born 1981 in Tehran, Iran

Tala Madani’s paintings, drawings, and stop-motion animations construct grotesque worlds and fantastical scenes in which the boneheadedness of men reaches a fever pitch. Madani tends to depict her male protagonists as disemboweled, humiliated, and pathetic entities, quickly rendered figures that leak fluids, engage in curious homosocial rites of passage, and inflict intolerable pain upon one another.

The blunt inelegance of Madani’s irredeemable men merge with a style of painting reminiscent of art-historical legacy figures such as Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler, turning tropes of abstraction into bodily fluids that leave their mark on the canvas and heighten their grotesque humor. Madani’s stop-motion animations are similar in style and execution. Each minute of video consists of close to 2,500 still images quickly painted sequentially on a single piece of wood for a camera to record frame by frame. In sequence, the images begin a smeary movement across a plane, representing an imagined world that is insufferably soiled and replete with the markings of the ridiculous, however much it might resemble our real world.