On the occasion of the opening of The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970-2020, featured artists Tishan Hsu, Tala Madani, and Jacolby Satterwhite chat with Senior Curator of the MCA and organizer of the exhibition, Jamillah James, about the past, present, and future of painting.

Spanning an international and intergenerational group of artists, The Living End surveys the arc of painting over the last 50 years, highlighting it as a mode of artistic expression in a constant state of renewal and rebirth.

CART captioning in English and Spanish is provided for this talk.

About the Speakers

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Tishan Hsu‘s early years were in Zurich, Switzerland, Ohio, Wisconsin, Virginia, and New York. He received his BSAD in 1973 and M.Arch in 1975 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). While at MIT, he also studied at the Carpenter Center and Graduate School of Design, Harvard University. Hsu has resided in New York since 1979, showing first at the Pat Hearn Gallery. Since 1985, Hsu has shown extensively in the US, Europe, Mexico, and Asia, with works in many public and private collections. From 1988 to 1990, Hsu lived and worked in Cologne, Germany, and from 2014 to 2016 in Shanghai, China.

Hsu has held solo exhibitions at institutions including most recently MAMCO Geneve, Geneva, Switzerland, (2024); Secession, Vienna, Austria (2023/24); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2021); and Sculpture Center, New York, NY (2020/21). He has participated in major international group exhibitions and biennials including The Milk of Dreams, the 59th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2022); and Is it morning for you yet?, 58th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia (2022).
Tala Madani (b. 1981, Tehran, Iran) makes paintings and animations whose indelible images bring together wide-ranging modes of critique, prompting reflection on gender and political authority, and questions of who and what gets represented in art. Her work is populated by mostly naked, bald, middle-aged men engaged in acts that push their bodies to their limits. Bodily fluids and beams of light emerge from their orifices, generating metaphors for the tactile expressivity of paint. In Madani’s work, slapstick humor is inseparable from violence and creation is synonymous with destruction, reflecting a complex and gut-level vision of contemporary power imbalances of all kinds. Her approach to figuration combines the radical morphology of a modernist with a contemporary sense of sequencing, movement, and speed. Thus, her work finds some of its most powerful echoes in cartoons, cinema, and other popular durational forms.
Jacolby Satterwhite (b. 1986, Columbia, SC) is celebrated for a conceptual practice addressing crucial themes of ritual, fantasy, freedom, and world-building through immersive installation, virtual reality, and digital media. He uses a range of software to produce intricately detailed animations and live action film that make up an entirely unique cinematic universe, including a cast of characters featuring various artists and friends. These animations serve as the stage on which the artist synthesizes the multiple disciplines that encompass his practice, namely illustration, performance, painting, sculpture, photography, and writing. Satterwhite draws from an extensive set of real and fantastical references, guided by mythology, contemporary visual culture, and music as a means of disrupting the conventions of Western art, while celebrating black queerness and freedom from oppression and discrimination. An equally significant influence is that of his late mother, Patricia Satterwhite, whose ethereal vocals and diagrams for visionary household products serve as the source material within a decidedly complex structure of memory and mythology.

Satterwhite received his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Arts, Baltimore, and his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Satterwhite’s work is featured in collections, exhibitions, and festivals around the world. He has collaborated with several musicians, including Solange Knowles on her visual album, When I Get Home (2019), The 1975 on the music video for “Having No Head” (2020), and Perfume Genius on his album Ugly Season (2022). Satterwhite was awarded the United States Artist Francie Bishop Good & David Horvitz Fellowship in 2016 as well as a public art commission in collaboration with the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Public Art Fund to inaugurate Lincoln Center’s new David Geffen Hall, which debuted in October 2022 in New York and is currently on view. Satterwhite’s immersive 6-channel video commission, A Metta Prayer, was recently on view in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Great Hall from October 2023 to January 2024.

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Tags: Chicago, Jacolby Satterwhite, Jamillah James, MCA, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Near North Side, Tala Madani, Talk | The Living End Artist Roundtable, THE LIVING END, The Living End Artist Roundtable, The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies 1970–2020, Tishan Hsu