Tala Madani: Biscuits accompanies the first North American survey of the Iranian-born artist’s paintings and animations. Organized by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), the exhibition brings together fifteen years of the artist’s incisive work, highlighting the often absurd socio-cultural dynamics enacted within Madani’s art and, more broadly, the potent and combustible relationship between art history and global history. The publication is the most comprehensive on Madani’s work to date. Paintings and animations from Madani’s major series dating from 2005 to the present are represented by approximately eighty plates, which offer a rare look at the rich process by which the artist develops her ribald menagerie of characters. The catalogue also features a conversation between Madani and Ali Subotnick, guest curator of the exhibition, as well as new essays by Rebecca Lowery, MOCA Assistant Curator; Maggie Nelson, acclaimed Los Angeles-based writer; and Evan Calder Williams, Associate Professor at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. These essays range from personal to critical, encompassing contemplations of motherhood and sexual politics, as well as contextualizing Madani’s work in art history.

 This publication is available for purchase in relation to the Henry’s exhibition, Tala Madani: Be flat.

 Tala Madani (b. 1981, Tehran, Iran) 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.