From the 4th of June until the 10th of July, Iranian-American artist Tala Madini’s exhibition “Skid Marks” will be showing at the Pilar Corrias Gallery in London. The exhibition will feature paintings and animation continuing her “Shit Moms” series and will mark the artist’s first solo exhibition in the UK in five years.
While “Skid Marks” will be showing in the gallery’s location on Eastcastle Street, another series called “Chalk Mark”will be showing at the gallery on Saville Road from June 4th until the 10th of September.
Madani is known for her satirical, often graphically transgressive work, which has been described as “uncomfortable comedy that aligns repulsion with empathy, intimacy with the grotesque.”
Starting in 2018, the “Shit Moms” series has depicted maternal figures painted as if made of faeces. Whereas previous iterations of the series saw the mothers interacting with children, these latest installments will show them “grappling with representations or drawings of children rather than children themselves” according to the gallery’s website.
In an interview for the Guggenheim Museum last year, she described the process that led to the series’ inception. Following an 8 month hiatus from painting she decided to paint a mother and child figure to “get it out of [her] system.” Once finished, she found the finished product “repellent” and a “kitsch image.”
She began wiping away the painting only to see that in the process the mother had become “quite shitty” and thus the idea was born. Through sharing her idea with friends and colleagues she got a sense of the taboo she was pushing up against.
According to Madani, the depiction of mothers is a response to “one of the largest motifs in western culture”, marked by the iconic figure of the virgin Mary. She says that “all the mothers are virgins in this canon. They’re pristine.”
Madani has described herself as interested in art that “excavates from the psyche, not the frontal lobe, not the intellectual, not the speakable, but the unspeakable.”
She further stated: “You have to work really hard to make a transgressive abstract work. I think it should involve real poo.”
“Skid Marks” features other works including Pinocchio as a “real boy” with a wooden penis and a series depicting the artist’s fascination with ceiling fans.
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