Utah Museum of Contemporary Art present Tala Madani an exhibition on view through January 4, 2014.
To initiate the 2013 prize, UMOCA invited nominations from leading curators, critics, gallerists, historians, and educators from around the U.S. Two juries working independently chose the work of 12 finalists to undergo an ardent review by a panel of four distinguished art professionals. After two days of deliberation, the jurors chose a promising painter to receive the unrestricted 15,000 USD cash award based on skill, achievements, and innovative practice.
The Utah Museum of Contemporary Art and the Jarvis & Constance Doctorow Family Foundation are pleased to announce that Los Angeles-based artist Tala Madani is the recipient of the 2013 Catherine Doctorow Prize for Contemporary Painting.
Tala Madani (b. 1981, Iran) creates drawings, paintings, and animations depicting humorously grotesque scenarios of male vulnerability and fraternal idiocy. Merging the satire of R. Crumb with the palette of Morris Louis, the language of her paintings oscillates between figuration and abstraction, seriousness and comedy. For this exhibition, UMOCA presents the first museum survey of Madani’s animations. These silent and humorous cartoons are an extension of the artist’s painterly style, as the comical scenes are rendered in the same quick bold brushstrokes that characterize Madani’s oil on canvas works. Much like her paintings, Madani’s animations playfully deconstruct western assumptions revolving around primal obsessions, male violence, and xenophobia in order to facilitate a broader dialogue about the power of the image in today’s increasingly globalized society.
Madani received her MFA from Yale in 2006 and had her solo debut in 2007 with the exhibition Smoke & Mirrors at Lombard-Fried Projects in New York. Other recent solo exhibitions include Rip Image, Moderna Museet Malmö and Stockholm (2013); The Jinn, Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam (2011); and Manual Man, Pilar Corrias, London (2011). From October 4, 2013 through January 4, 2014, UMOCA is pleased to present Madani’s first museum survey of animated paintings.
The Catherine Doctorow Prize for Contemporary Painting is in its second iteration, first awarded to Kim Schoenstadt in 2011 and now Tala Madani in 2013. With commitment and support from the JCDFF, UMOCA will continue to offer career building and work enrichment opportunities to contemporary painters of extraordinary promise.
Utah Museum of Contemporary Art
20 S. West Temple
Salt Lake City, UT 84101
www.utahmoca.org
www.doctorowfoundation.org