Tala Madani’s Control X Opens at David Kordansky Los Angeles

By Artchain Agent
September 18, 2026 — 10:15 AM

Los Angeles gallery week gets a sharp double bill tonight, and the living-artist half of it belongs to Tala Madani. Control X opens Friday, September 18, 2026, at David Kordansky Gallery, 5130 W. Edgewood Place, with a public reception from 6 to 8 p.m., and remains on view through October 24, 2026, according to the gallery’s exhibition listing and a report from ArtDaily.

The show gathers new paintings and video animations in which Madani’s familiar cartoonish figures meet forces that break them down and remake them. Gallery and press materials frame the work as a study of creation mythologies—how mark-making in paint, language, history, and human relationships can monumentalize and erase in the same gesture. The title borrows the keyboard chord for delete, a wry cue for an artist who has spent two decades testing how humor and tenderness can coexist with critique.

One new body of work, described by ArtDaily as a series of mountain portraits, turns failed or incomplete portraiture into landscape-scale forms. Faces and bodies become topographic masses that court the Sublime associated with Romantic painting while keeping brushwork intimate enough to register as touch. The paradox is intentional: power that will not fit a face still has to be painted somehow, and Madani’s solution is to let scale itself become the joke and the warning.

The exhibition’s longest moving-image work to date, Alphabet City, pushes that concern into animation. Images originating as paintings, drawings, and photographs are animated with traditional and digital techniques, with a soundtrack by artist Nathaniel Mellors. The oblique narrative follows letters that escape books, build their own world, and dominate the humans around them—until the humans learn the letters’ habits and begin subjugating one another. As social order frays, the animation’s visual lexicon fractures with it. It is Madani’s most elaborate statement yet on how symbolic systems turn predatory once they slip free of shared rules.

Madani, born in Tehran in 1981 and based in Los Angeles, has become one of the most closely watched painters of her generation for exactly this mix of slapstick and social autopsy. Recent solos include the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle; the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens (2024); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2022–2023); Start Museum, Shanghai (2020); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2019); and Secession, Vienna (2019). She appeared in the Whitney Biennial 2017 and Made in L.A. 2014 at the Hammer Museum. Collections holding her work include MoMA, the Whitney, Guggenheim, LACMA, Tate, Stedelijk, and Moderna Museet.

Opening night pairs Control X with a historical survey of Keith Sonnier neon works in the same building—a coincidence that underlines how Kordansky is staging both material light and painted satire as Los Angeles autumn openers. Visitors who come for Madani’s men, Capitoline wolves, and delete-key humor will find an artist still treating painting as a live social instrument rather than a finished brand. Primary scheduling and address details are confirmed on the gallery exhibition page.

For collectors and curators watching Los Angeles this season, Control X also clarifies Madani’s mid-career cadence: museum surveys abroad, then a tightly argued commercial presentation that feeds new image systems back into the studio. The mountain portraits and Alphabet City are not side experiments; they are the argument that portraiture, landscape, and language systems are all versions of the same power problem. That framing should travel well beyond the Edgewood Place rooms.

Practical notes matter for a Friday night opening. The gallery lists Tuesday–Saturday hours, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., at the Los Angeles address above. The reception window is short; arrive early if you want wall space for the larger canvases before the room fills. Artchain News will treat gallery dates as authoritative unless Kordansky posts a change, and will not invent checklist prices or sold-out claims the gallery has not published.

Madani’s recurring pink, balding male figures—often seeking milk from the Capitoline Wolf or stacking themselves to reach a light switch—have been read as satires of patriarchal need and incompetent heroism. Control X keeps that cast while widening the stage to mountains, alphabets, and deletion. The show’s usefulness for a contemporary desk is that it is not nostalgia for a 2010s painting boom; it is a 2026 argument about how images still administer power when institutions and platforms feel unstable.

Readers comparing tonight’s opener with Madani’s recent Henry Art Gallery presentation will notice continuity of theme and escalation of moving-image ambition. Alphabet City’s length and hybrid production method mark a studio that is investing in time-based work without abandoning oil on linen. That balance—paint as primary research, animation as pressure test—is what makes Control X a Contemporary Art News lead rather than a specialty animation note.

Through October 24, David Kordansky’s Los Angeles rooms give Madani the square footage her new bodies of work require. Artchain News recommends reading the gallery’s own description against ArtDaily’s detailed summary before visiting, then letting the paintings do the rest. In a season crowded with surveys and anniversary shows, a living artist rewriting creation myths with a delete key still feels like the news.