Tala Madani

Iranian-American artist 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…The Saatchi Gallery

Tala Madani is a young, Iranian-born artist who has lived in the United States for seven years. Her painterly style is delicate, adroit, and agile, persistently on the verge of an attenuated hedonism; yet, at the same time, her message is simple and to the point, straight from the pit of Poe’s pendulum…

Works and biography

Despite the presence of cakes and candles, the scenes in the paintings of Iranian artist Tala Madani are far from celebratory. Madani’s world features middle-aged, Middle Eastern men in ritualistic cartoony episodes. Her characters are paunchy, crude and usually bald (but too hairy everyplace else.) These fidgety foreigners play somber, mildly treacherous games — slapping, plucking, tattooing, waxing, and burning — which evoke torture and strange homoerotic foreplay in equal measure. The paintings delight in their own cruelty and use humor to drag us in. But what we’re tempted to view as silly feels deadly serious to these aging, zealous chumps…

Portrait of the artist