Biscuits

Tala Madani's paintings of bald men behaving badly, lit from within by projectors, torchbeams and their own excretions, get their first full North American accounting in this catalogue for MOCA's 2022 survey.

Published by MACK with The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, for the exhibition at The Geffen Contemporary from September 2022 to February 2023, the book gathers roughly eighty plates covering fifteen years of paintings and animations from 2005 onward, along with forty previously unpublished sketchbook drawings. Ali Subotnick, who guest-curated the show, is in conversation with the artist, and new essays by Rebecca Lowery, Maggie Nelson and Evan Calder Williams take up motherhood, sexual politics and the projection logic that runs through the animations. 224 pages, OTA-bound paperback with flaps.

Madani (b. 1981, Tehran) moved to the United States as a teenager and has worked in Los Angeles since studying at UCLA. The Shit Moms, Corner Projections and Manual Man series turn slapstick and scatology on the figure of male authority; the animations, built frame by frame from repainted canvases, extend the same logic into time.