TALA MADANI

Early life and Background

Tala Madani was born in Tehran in 1981 and studied calligraphy and painting from childhood before emigrating with her family to Oregon in 1994. She completed a BA in political science and visual arts at Oregon State University in Corvallis in 2004, followed by an MFA in painting from Yale University School of Art in 2006. Madani lives and works in Los Angeles, a context that informs her engagement with Western media imagery and global contemporary art networks.

Tala Madani Artworks

Tala Madani’s artworks combine loose, expressive brushwork with a pared-down graphic language to depict bald, middle-aged men, babies, and hybrid figures caught in slapstick yet unsettling scenarios that probe masculinity, violence, and vulnerability. Working across painting, drawing, and stop-motion animation, Madani uses humour, grotesque exaggeration, and bodily fluids to register cultural anxieties around sexuality, family, and the politics of looking.

Men, rituals and grotesque comedy

Early paintings and animations focus on groups of men engaged in absurd rituals, often involving cake, excrement, or fire, that expose power dynamics within male social spaces. Works such as the so-called ‘cake paintings’, first exhibited in her debut solo exhibition at Lombard-Freid Projects, New York in 2007, show half-dressed men cavorting in and around oversized birthday cakes, using slapstick to undercut patriarchal authority. Other paintings like O (2012), The Gift (2015), and Son Down (2015) amplify male genitals to monstrous scale, turning fantasies of virility into images of comic threat and impotence.

Shit Moms, children and domestic scenes

Subsequent bodies of work introduce babies and mothers as protagonists, notably the ‘Shit Moms’ paintings in which maternal figures made of excrement navigate domestic interiors and public spaces. These works, which featured prominently in Madani’s survey Biscuits at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, reframe idealised notions of motherhood and care through abject forms while maintaining a graphic, pastel palette that tempers the intensity of the subject matter. In interviews, Madani has described using a comic style to make difficult themes ‘rawer and more palatable’, emphasising the way surface humour coexists with psychological unease in her practice.

Animations, language and symbol

Madani’s stop-motion animations extend her painterly universe into time-based works where faceless characters, recurring motifs, and fragments of language enact cycles of transformation and erasure. Recent projects, including institutional exhibitions such as Be flat at Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, and Shitty Disco at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, explore how symbols, typography, and mark-making themselves can structure, or destabilise, hierarchies of power.

Tala Madani Awards, Residencies and Collections

Madani has received major recognition, including the De Volkskrant Art Award (2012), the Catherine Doctorow Prize for Contemporary Painting (2013), and a Tiffany Foundation Biennial Grant (2014), alongside fellowships at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam, and the British School at Rome. Her artworks are held in the collections of institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Moderna Museet, Stockholm and Malmö; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Tala Madani Exhibitions

Tala Madani has been the subject of extensive solo exhibitions at museums including at Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Start Museum, Shanghai; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Secession, Vienna; Portikus, Frankfurt; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; Nottingham Contemporary; and Moderna Museet in Stockholm and Malmö.

Madani has also participated in major biennials and group exhibitions, including the Liverpool Biennial, Venice Biennale, Göteborg International Biennial, Marrakech Biennale, Taipei Biennial, the Whitney Biennial, Istanbul Biennial, Made in L.A. at the Hammer Museum, and landmark surveys such as The Generational: Younger Than Jesus at the New Museum, New York.

Select solo exhibitions

• Be flat, Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, 2024–2025
• Shitty Disco, National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST), Athens, 2024–2025
• Biscuits, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2022–2023
• Start Museum, Shanghai, 2020
• Tala Madani, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2019
• Tala Madani, Secession, Vienna, 2019
• Tala Madani, Portikus, Frankfurt, 2019
• Smiley has no nose, La Panacée, Montpellier, 2017
• Archaeology of the Final Decade / Tala Madani, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, 2016
• First solo museum exhibition, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 2016
• Tala Madani, Nottingham Contemporary, 2014
• The Jalousie, Moderna Museet Malmö and Moderna Museet Stockholm, 2013

Select group exhibitions

• The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970–2020, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2024
• Burning Down the House: Rethinking Family, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, 2024
• 50 Paintings, Milwaukee Art Museum, 2023
• 16th Istanbul Biennial, The Seventh Continent, 2019
• Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2017
• Made in L.A. 2014, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2014
• Venice Biennale, Danish Pavilion, Speech Matters, 54th International Art Exhibition, 2011
• Younger Than Jesus, New Museum Triennial, New York, 2009

Tala Madani FAQs

Ocula | 2025