Tala Madani: Be flat

Be flat is Tala Madani's (b. 1981, Tehran, Iran; lives in Los Angeles, CA) debut solo exhibition in Washington State, featuring recent and newly commissioned works that explore the influence of symbols, language, and mark-making on power dynamics and individual agency.

Known for paintings and installations that reflect life's complexities and contradictions, Madani often portrays human figures in vulnerable, perplexing, and humorous states. Her characters, placed in cinematic and dream-like spaces, evoke a surreal and unsettling atmosphere. Madani’s mastery of painting allows her to play with the medium itself, blending quick, witty brushstrokes with deep critical insight.

At the Henry, Madani takes the next step in her practice, deepening her explorations through new suites of blackboard and Film Fall paintings, along with a selection of animations presented in intimate architectural settings. The exhibition also introduces a new series of satirical depictions of father figures engaged in sports, a traditionally masculine domain, portrayed with absurdity and vulnerability. Through her signature humor, Madani critiques conventional notions of masculinity and power, shedding light on the contradictions within familial and social structures.

Be flat invites visitors to a multi-sensory experience, encountering and re-encountering Madani’s fantastical characters and the uncanny aspects of her imagery while questioning our assumptions about identity and power.

Visitor Advisory: Please note that some works in this exhibition contain depictions of and language around bodily fluids (excrement, blood), naked bodies (genitalia), graphic violence, and death.

Artist Bio

Tala Madani makes paintings and animations whose indelible images bring together wide-ranging modes of critique, prompting reflection on gender, political authority, and questions of who and what gets represented in art. Her work is populated by mostly naked, bald, middle-aged men engaged in acts that push their bodies to their limits. Bodily fluids and beams of light emerge from their orifices, generating metaphors for the tactile expressivity of paint. In Madani’s work, slapstick humor is inseparable from violence and creation is synonymous with destruction, reflecting a complex and gut-level vision of contemporary power imbalances of all kinds. Her approach to figuration combines the radical morphology of a modernist with a contemporary sense of sequencing, movement, and speed. Thus, her work finds some of its most powerful echoes in cartoons, cinema, and other popular durational forms.
 

Madani has been the subject of solo exhibitions at museums worldwide, including The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2023); Start Museum, Shanghai (2020); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2019); Secession, Vienna (2019); Portikus, Frankfurt (2019); La Panacée, Montpellier, France (2017); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2016); Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2016); Nottingham Contemporary, England (2014); and Moderna Museet, Malmö and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2013). She participated in the 16th Istanbul Biennial: The Seventh Continent, Istanbul, Turkey (2019); Whitney Biennial 2017, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Made in L.A. 2014, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, among many other international group exhibitions. Madani’s work is in the permanent collections of many institutions, including Moderna Museet, Stockholm and Malmö, Sweden; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Modern, London; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Madani lives and works in Los Angeles.