Lot 1: TOBA KHEDOORI

B. 1964
UNTITLED

measurements
91.5 by 61cm.

alternate measurements
36 by 24in.

pencil on paper

Executed in 2006.

PROVENANCE

Donated by the artist, courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles

NOTE

A key figure in the current contemporary art scene in Los Angeles, Toba Khedoori's work can be described as drawing, painting and in its sheer monumentality, mural. She depicts elements of our built environment: doors, windows, walls, floors and stairs adrift within the huge expanse of paper on which they are painted. Her 'canvas' consists of large sheets of unframed paper, slightly overlapping and stapled directly to the wall. These may reach up to three meters in height and span as much as eight metres, the fragility of the paper surface at odds with its monumental scale. Khedoori begins each work with preliminary sketches made from photographs or models. Each is coated in wax which as she works, usually on the floor, collects the detritus of her studio. The flotsam and jetsam of the studio, including dust, hair and debris, become embedded in the surface referring to both the 'dirty' working process and the passage of time. The coated sheets of paper are then stapled to the wall where Khedoori outlines the image in delicate black ink before filling in the forms with pale oils. Once a mark is made it remains on the paper, even if altered, creating visual layers in which all traces of the artist's gestures are incorporated into the finished work.

Khedoori's work references Abstract Expressionism and colour-field painting in its flatness and lateral spread. Clement Greenberg wrote of a 'crisis of the easel picture' when talking of artists such as Jackson Pollock, whose paintings began to expand to fill the wall. Khedoori's only framing device is that of the museum or gallery walls on which the work is hung. Her work also offers a more contemporary take on minimalism in its formal austerity and repetition of serial forms.

In her earlier work, Khedoori painted repetitive units such as cinema seating, rows of windows and doors, chainlink fencing. More recently she has been focusing on individual elements like a door, window or in Untitled, 2006, a plank of wood leaning against a wall. This sculptural gesture which echoes the leaning pieces of Andre Cadere, Richard Serra and Jim Lambie, is rendered in two dimensions as trompe l'oeil. It is delicately and meticulously drawn and coloured in soft pencil. Like much of her work there is a metaphysical quality to this image. Like her other works, Untitled offers very little comfort or sense of purpose. Instead Khedoori's familiar fragments of our environment, articulate the 'basic modern dilemma' of being adrift and disconnected in the world. As Lane Relyea has evocatively written, 'What she ends up representing is the heroic effort to reconstruct some rudimentary visual order under modern conditions, as well as the ruins into which such order is always falling'. (Lane Relyea, Toba Khedoori, history painter of modern oblivion, in Toba Khedoori -- Gezeichnete Bilder (Exhibition Catalogue), Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel, Basel 2001, p. 55) Khedoori has shown at MoCA Los Angeles (1997) and the St Louis Art Museum (2003). Her work is in the collections of MoCA, Los Angeles, MOMA, New York, the LA County Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. CS