Tala Madani: Shit Moms / Ron Nagle: Nocturn Around / Lisa Holzer: What carries you?

Tala Madani
Shit Moms

Shit Moms is the title of both Tala Madani’s exhibition at Secession and a new body of work that deals with the idea(l)s and (corpo)realities of motherhood. While the title refers to the colloquial term for women who in some regard fail their job or role as a mother, it also literally designates her approach to the theme: smeared, somewhat shapeless female bodies appear as mother figures made of excrement.

The shit mothers, shown in tender mother-and-child intimacy or attended by several babies, inhabit modernist apartments, appear in spot-lit disco halls, and peek at babies playing in abandoned houses. Scattered among the Shit Moms are smaller groups of paintings, framed by three large-scale diptychs hung in the corners that are composed of a painting of a projector that seemingly throws its projected image onto the adjacent painting.

Alongside the paintings, Madani will also present a number of animation films, whose protagonists in a disturbing but ferociously funny manner seem to be trapped in the loops of destructive, violent behaviour.

Both her paintings and her animated films operate with a visual language that is often grotesquely exaggerated, drastic and tender, obscene and funny alike. Madani’s oeuvre posits a world in which primal desires are unrestrained by conventions and social norms. Her works are suffused by light that points both in and outward—at human instinct and upended social ritual.

Tala Madani was born in Tehran in 1981 and studied in the United States. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Ron Nagle
Nocturn Around

For the past six decades or so, Ron Nagle has been pursuing parallel careers as a musician and sculptor. His small-format ceramic sculptures are simultaneously miniature landscapes, abstract compositions, thoughts turned into form, and visual jokes—Nagle’s humor and his penchant for puns and wordplay are well known and find expression not only in his song texts, but also in the titles of his sculptures. His works display many influences from European and American painting, Japanese Momoyama Period ceramics, and even hot rod culture.

In addition to their miniature format, the artist’s works are characterized by structure, form, color and the equally significant and recurring aspect of surface modeling. Since the 1950s Nagle has been consistently working to redefine clay as an artistic material. His own development is closely interrelated with a movement dating from this period, now known as the California Clay Movement, which has a particular focus on the revaluation and establishment of ceramic materials as fully valid artistic media.

In the Secession, the San Francisco-based artist presents a selection of 25 sculptures and drawings from recent years.

Ron Nagle was born in San Francisco in 1939 and lives and works in San Francisco.

Lisa Holzer
What carries you?

Lisa Holzer’s art probes the structure of desire as well as the question of what constitutes a picture. In addition to photography and performative gestures, writing is a vital element in her work. Her texts, which she sometimes also integrates into her pictures as one motif among others, convey her idiosyncratic ideas with wit and humor and reflect her wide-ranging interests in pop culture, art history, feminism, psychoanalysis, and politics.

One recurrent subject of her color photographs is food. She worked, for instance, with frosting dyed in various colors and shapeless blobs of pea and potato puree, dramatically staging these lowly materials by applying them to white backdrops with expressive gestures. The edible paints look appetizing and nauseating at once. The texture of the pastose smears is an unmistakable nod to the august gestures of monochrome painting, here deftly balanced by the banality of the motifs and the flatness of photography. Holzer adds to this playful exploration of the characteristics of different media when she exploits the antithesis between the conventions of artist’s editions and individualized creative choice by enhancing the outside of the glass panes in her picture frames with a few seemingly random dabs of paint and translucent globs of polyurethane.

In her exhibition What carries you? in the Secession’s Grafisches Kabinett, Holzer will present fourteen new photographs for which she attends to grapes.

Lisa Holzer was born in Vienna in 1971 and lives and works in Berlin and Vienna.