Toba Khedoori

Text by Julien Bismuth

Los Angeles-based artist Toba Khedoori is known for delicately shaded, large-scale compositions that depict objects and everyday environments divorced from any background. Whether drawing and painting onto thin sheets of paper and stapling these directly onto the wall, or using canvas as physical support, her works are poised between ephemerality and monumentality. Doors and windows, chairs and stairs, fences and bricks, train compartments and fireplaces appear at once familiar and unrecognizable, and their “neither-here-nor-there” presence seems to become a space for meditation.

Designed in close collaboration with the artist, this exquisitely produced—and generously scaled—catalogue features a recent series of oil paintings from her 2012 exhibition at David Zwirner in New York, which marked her sixth presentation with the gallery. Gatefolds allow the viewer to appreciate the intricacy of these works. Ropes in various configurations are a recurrent motif, along with subjects from the natural world, including mountain ranges, tree branches, and rivers. Spare, open expanses of the white page surround some of the renderings, giving the images a calming, otherworldly quality; their visual power is contextualized with an essay about Khedoori’s practice by noted artist and writer Julien Bismuth.