Tala Madani Shows New Paintings and Her Longest Animation in Los Angeles

"Control X", a solo exhibition of new paintings and video animations by Tala Madani, is on view at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles until October 24. The show opened on September 18. According to the gallery, it includes a new series of "mountain portraits" that present their subjects as imposing features of a landscape and recall Romantic landscape painting. One of them, "Mountain Portrait" from 2026, is an oil on linen 80 inches square. The exhibition also introduces "Alphabet City", which the gallery describes as Madani's longest and most complex moving-image work to date. It follows letters that break free from books, build their own world and come to dominate the humans around them. The images were first made as paintings, drawings and photographs and then animated with traditional and digital techniques, and Nathaniel Mellors made the soundtrack. The gallery writes that the show turns on the overlap of creation and destruction. Madani lives and works in Los Angeles. Her recent solo museum exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and the Secession in Vienna, and her work is in the collections of MoMA, the Guggenheim, Tate and LACMA. The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday.