Tala Madani: Chalk Mark

8 Jul-8 Sep 2021

Overview

Pilar Corrias is delighted to announce a solo  exhibition of new work by Tala Madani. Titled ‘Chalk Mark’, the presentation inaugurates the gallery’s new location at 2 Savile Row. 

‘Chalk Mark’ brings together new works by Madani exploring education and instruction. They include a series of Chalk Board paintings that engage with the role of copying and repetition in learning, via repeated motifs that are deliberately undisciplined and unruly. Children are depicted as accosted by education, with one painting showing a line of lilliputian figures entering the mouth of a prone adult male. A line of graduates exits from his back passage.

Unidentified officers appear repeatedly in the exhibition, symbols of enforcement, conformity and control. In a perversion of this dynamic, one painting shows a child drawing a policeman. In another, the child drawing the policemen has become a drawing himself. Another shows miniature children on magic carpets flying toward a pair of floor fans.

Madani is known for work that deconstructs and satirises social norms. Early works focused on farcical male figures engaged in crude or intimate activities. Recent years have seen female figures appear in her work, as well as those of children, and all her work is characterised by an uncomfortable comedy that aligns repulsion with empathy, intimacy with the grotesque.

‘Chalk Mark’ coincided with the final days of ‘Tala Madani: Skid Mark’ at Pilar Corrias Eastcastle Street. Together they constitute Madani’s first solo presentation in the UK in five years.