Thursday, October 13, 2016

Toba Khedoori

Known for her use of negative space, Australian born and Southern California resident, Toba Khedoori blurs the boundaries between drawing, painting, and installation with meticulous detail and craftsmanship.

In the first major survey of the artist's work to date, the Toba Khedoori exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) includes 25 compositions of Khedoori's work from 1994 to the present, arranged in loose chronological and thematic order.

Ushered into the contemporary art scene in the early 1990s with her two-dimensional negative space compositions, Khedoori's breakthrough came with monumental monotone paintings on paper, frequently rendering decontextualized, distanced, and often fragmented, commonplace architectural forms as in Untitled (doors, 1996) and LACMA’s own Untitled (hallway, 1997), within which detritus from her studio floor appears embedded in the wax surfaces.

Hovering between representation and abstraction, are the more recent and smaller scale oil-on-canvas paintings featuring photorealistic depictions as in Untitled (black fireplace, 2006), Untitled (white fireplace, 2005), and Untitled (leaves/branches, 2015). Her latest art moves toward grids and abstraction, such as Untitled (tile, 2015), a geometric study of a mosaic tile floor reflecting light from an unseen source.
 
With intricate detail, Khedoori's magnificent work is restrained yet intense, enveloping the viewer with a novel perspective of the mundane.
 
The exhibit is currently on view through March 19, 2017, at BCAM, 2nd Floor, 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036. For more information call (323) 857-6000 or visit http://www.lacma.org/
 
 

Following its run at LACMA, Toba Khedoori will be on view at the PĂ©rez Art Museum Miami from April 20–September 24, 2017.