Oven Light
February 9–April 7, 2019
Alte Brücke 2 / Maininsel
60594 Frankfurt am Main
Germany
Hours: Tuesday–Friday 12–7pm,
Saturday–Sunday 11am–7pm
T +49 69 96244540
info@portikus.de
The exhibition Oven Light by the Tehran-born and Los Angeles-based artist Tala Madani (*1981) focuses on new serial paintings and animations. Oven Light is Tala Madani’s first solo exhibition in Germany.
Tala Madani’s works show mundane light sources, such as stovepipes, projectors, and flashlights. They present light itself as a projected, brilliant, and radiant medium, and draw attention to what it reveals. Associations with classical painterly skills or the play of light as an early cinematic concept come to mind, magically creating the painted or real light projections on the canvas.
The paintings and animations communicate primal behaviors, negate the conformities of representation, and at the same time reveal sociopolitical rules. Power dynamics, patriarchal structures, and contemporary image politics are exposed by human drives, effects from splatter films, and sexualized physicality. The light in the works reveals supposed dark sides: childish expressions, violent fantasies, and animal instincts. Socially normal public behavior is exaggerated in the dark little films, so that the figures in the works can—or even must—succumb to their desires.
Tala Madani’s works jump from dream to drive, from forbidden thoughts to unavoidable desires. Clichés unveil the dynamics of society, slapstick plainly shows the truth. In this way, the works have something liberating about them, exactly what the adult world envies in children. One quite frequently feels like a rubbernecker, who is waiting for an accident and will be rewarded.
Born in Tehran in 1981, Madani received her MFA from the Yale University School of Art in 2006. Recent solo exhibitions include: La Panacée, Montpellier, 2017; First Light, MIT Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, 2016; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, 2014; Nottingham Contemporary, 2014; Rip Image, Moderna Museet Malmö & Stockholm, 2013. Madani has also been included in: The 2017 Whitney Biennial, New York; Hope and Hazard: A Comedy of Eros (Curated by Eric Fischl), Hall Art Foundation, New York 2017; Los Angeles – A Fiction, Musée d’art Contemporain de Lyon, 2017; Zeitgeist, MAMCO, Geneva, 2017; Invisible Adversaries, The Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, 2016; The Great Acceleration: Art in the Anthropocene, Taipei Biennial (curated by Nicholas Bourriaud).
Director: Philippe Pirotte
Curator: Christina Lehnert
This exhibition was generously supported by:
Städelschule Portikus e.V.
303 Gallery, New York
Pilar Corrias, London
