Toba Khedoori in Resonating Spaces

“Khedoori elevates the experience of the commonplace by treating ordinary objects and bits and pieces of nature as if they were precious baubles. Her attention to detail, her surrealist wit, and her appreciation for the magic of the everyday remind us to take stock of what surrounds us and to never be without a room of our own.” —Franklin Sirmans, curator of the recent Toba Khedoori retrospective at LACMA and Pérez Art Museum Miami in 2016–2017.

A large selection of works by Khedoori will be presented in a group exhibition titled Resonating Spaces, opening next month at Fondation Beyeler in Basel. Curated by Theodora Vischer and also featuring contributions by Leonor Antunes, Silvia Bächli, Susan Philipsz, and Rachel Whiteread, the show brings together works that “evoke spaces between the identifiable and the elusive. They create sites and respites, in which the capacity of remembering is elicited and images and memories come to life.”

Khedoori has been celebrated for more than two decades for mostly large scale paintings on paper in which visual understatement belies a powerful effect. The artist has created her own intricate atlas of objects and spaces—windows, doors, train compartments, natural forms, and horizon lines that are devoid of human presence and divorced from any background. Although over the last decade the artist made a series on medium-sized stretched canvases, she recently started focusing on large scale paintings on paper again, with compositions characterized by a tension between figure and ground. Khedoori’s precisely rendered imagery envelops the viewer's field of vision, appearing at once fragile and monumental, flat and illusory.

Image: Toba Khedoori, Untitled, 2019 (detail)