06 September - 21 October 2001

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Toba Khedoori depicts urban spaces with a beauty and beguiling simplicity that are instantly seductive. Delicate outlines in soft ink are given shape with pastel-coloured hues, rendering a range of recognisable architectural surfaces with intimate precision. Yet her paintings are pervaded by a disturbing sense of alienation: looming large are mute architectural fragments, such as rows of windows in a façade, a corridor lined with closed doors, or bricks in a dislocated wall. These features hover in an undefined space, that of the huge expanse of paper on which they are painted. Khedoori's 'canvas' consists of large sheets of unframed paper, slightly overlapping and stapled directly to the wall. These may reach up to three metres in height and span as much as eight metres. There is no human presence but, like a stage set for an impending drama, the possibility of action is always there.

Khedoori begins each work with preliminary sketches made from photographs or models. She starts the painting on the floor, coating each sheet of paper in wax. As she moves about the space, particles of dust, hairs and other detritus settle on the coated paper, embedding physical evidence of space and time within the painting's surface. The sheets of paper are then stapled to the wall and the image outlined in delicate black ink, then painted in pale oils. Once a mark is made, it remains visible even if altered, creating visual layers in which, as in the drawing process, all traces of the artist's gestures are incorporated into the finished work.

Obsessive and relentless in its repetition, Khedoori's imagery presents a purified geometry mapped onto a 'dirty' blankness that is entirely abstract, yet her paintings remain firmly figurative. There is something of Abstract Expressionism in the scale and ambition of her works, while the way the artistic process is made evident and the marking of time find echoes in the works of Hanne Darboven or On Kawara among others. Above all, perhaps, it is the quiet existential quality of her work that speaks the loudest. A journey through the great outdoors that draws up short against a solitary, permanently closed door.

Born in Sydney, Australia, in 1964, Toba Khedoori lives and works in Los Angeles. This, her first UK exhibition, comprises new works especially prepared for the show and is organised in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Basel.