Tala Madani moved to America from Iran when she was 13 and has said that her difficulty learning English attracted her to art. At Yale she became immersed in both Postwar American Abstraction, and the Conceptualism that offered a critique of it in the 1960s. Madani's explorations of the vocabulary of Abstraction drew her to wonder whether the chosen non-figurative language was a deliberate refusal to verbalise, especially during the aftermath of the War. In her own work Madani combines the language of Abstraction, especially of the Abstract Expressionists and the Colourfield artists, with the figurative, perhaps not dissimilar to Roger Hilton's quest to 'reinvent figuration'. Madani never makes prep studies but draws with her brush directly onto the canvas. Her work is populated only by men, who seem to be caricatures but perhaps they are reflections of our own anxieties in the post 9/11 world. Manual Grid shows these men peering out from a Sol Le Witt-influenced grid, trapped like petty criminals in 18th century stocks, the oozing black discs of paint doubling as holes.

Find out more here: http://www.bristolmuseums.org.uk/blog/tala-madani-introduction/