Toba Khedoori
On October 17, the gallery will open an exhibition of new work by the Los Angeles-based artist Toba Khedoori. This will be the inaugural exhibition for the gallery's new space on 19th street in Chelsea, and the artist's third show with David Zwirner. Toba Khedoori, a recent recipient of a prestigious MacArthur grant of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, will also exhibit her work in "Drawing Now. Eight Propositions" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, opening on October 16. Recent solo exhibitions of the artist's work were held at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel and the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London.
Toba Khedoori's art is hybrid in nature, and locates itself between drawing, painting and installation. Made with oil paint on large sheets of wax-coated paper, Khedoori's work resonates first and foremost through its sheer monumentality. Ranging from 12 x 7 ft. to 12 x 30 ft., the artist's works tend to fill the entire field of vision. Often large parts of the wax-coated paper are left blank, underscoring that the images floating on Khedoori's work are supported by their own spatial reality, and not just by the gallery wall. In earlier work the imagery drew almost exclusively from architecture. Sometimes Khedoori would focus on architectural fragments, whereas in other works she would push the depicted structures into the realm of a Kafkaesque surreal. Common to all works was and is the complete absence of any human presence; Khedoori's structures and buildings never feel as if they are populated by people.