LONDON.- Pilar Corrias opened two exhibitions of new work by Tala Madani. ‘Skid Mark’ is at the gallery’s Eastcastle Street location, 4 June – 10 July 2021, whilst ‘Chalk Mark’ inaugurates the gallery’s new location at 2 Savile Row, opening 8 July and running until 8 September 2021. The exhibitions include painting and animation, and together constitute the artist’s first UK solo presentation in five years.

‘Chalk Mark’ brings together new works exploring education and instruction. Where ‘Skid Mark’ focuses on the interior world, ‘Chalk Mark’ takes on the exterior, examining the ways in which children are controlled and cultured by their schooling.

A series of Chalk Board paintings 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. A painting of children on magic carpets flying toward a pair of floor fans recalls the ceiling fans of ‘Skid Mark’.

Tala Madani (b. 1981, Tehran) is known for work that deconstructs and satirises social norms. Early works focused on farcical male figures engaged in crude or intimate activities. These works examined power structures and the construction of male identity. Recent years have seen female figures appear in her work (shit moms), 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.