Artist Toba Khedoori Explores the Space Between

I first met Toba Khedoori when she was a graduate student in the MFA program at the University of California in Los Angeles. I was an undergraduate at the same university, hesitating between majors. I remember being both captivated and disoriented by her work when I first saw it. The elements of her paintings, like the words in a poem, were familiar to me. Yet in their composition and interaction, they acquired an ambiguous form of estrangement. Khedoori covers the large sheets of paper that she habitually paints on with wax, turning them into a palimpsest that retains and embalms the incidental traces of her activity. Her renderings often float against an absence of background, context, or place. Whereas the works of many of her contemporaries are relentlessly framed by texts and paratexts, Khedoori’s paintings are made all the more eloquent by the self-effacement of their author.

Since then, I have kept looking, thinking, and occasionally writing about her work. My relationship to it has evolved, but in a curious manner. The artist, who is Australian-born and of Iraqi descent, creates paintings that lead me back to that initial feeling of interrogation, meaning to question in between, from within the space of an interval. Certain artworks or bodies of work require additional information, or address themselves to external ideas.

In Khedoori’s case, it is instead one’s own knowledge, habits, and preconceptions that are called into question. The intensity of her work’s interrogation has not waned for me over time, but has instead deepened and become more acute, adapting and responding to the shifts and evolutions in my thinking.

The first work that one sees upon entering her current exhibition—which is on view at the Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany, until February 20, 2022—is “Untitled (window)” (1999). It consists of three large sheets of paper, stapled to the wall. A precisely rendered window adorns the central sheet, not quite in the middle of the paper, but slightly off-center. The two additional pieces of paper have been left unmarked, except for a layer of wax. The glass of the window has been painted an opaque indigo, bordering on black. As we can no longer look through its virtual panes, we are left to gaze at the window itself, its frame and structure. The painting allows us to look at something we normally only look through, imbuing it with an active presence. Moreover, the work is accompanied only by the most literal of titles. Toba Khedoori is not an artist who surrounds her works with language, turning them into vehicles for ideas, intentions, or positions. The task of interpretation is left strictly to the viewer.

Khedoori’s work needs to be experienced in person. The scale of each painting is essential, as is the positioning of the rendering on its surface. By mostly working on oversized pieces of paper, the artist questions the museological distinction between paintings and works on paper. She paints on paper, but on sheets the size of monumental canvases. She also leaves her works exposed and unframed, stapling or pinning them directly to the wall. She deliberately retains certain incidental traces of the outside world: from her own shoe print in “Untitled (tunnel)” (1994) to the dust, dirt, and dog hair in some of her other works. Unfinished or abandoned tracings in graphite appear in several of her paintings. The paper becomes a visible memory, not only of the creation and composition of the work, but also of the artist’s presence and work environment.

“Untitled (buildings/windows)” (1994) also consists of three large sheets of paper. The central sheet has been left blank, marked only by its coating of wax. The two side sheets contain unfinished renderings of a gridded multitude of the same guillotine-style window depicted in “Untitled (window)” (1999). Their composition evokes the facades of tall residential buildings. When I looked at this painting again, I did not think of what it depicted, but rather of what it concealed.

I thought of the spaces behind the windows, and of what it was like to live suspended between earth and sky, wedged in a stack of other windowed boxes. In short, I wondered and interrogated my own domestic setting, which is an apartment several stories above ground in a large city.

In recent years, as the art world has expanded and accelerated, its mechanisms of promotion have become more insidiously destructive of the actual bounty of art, namely its capacity to slow things down, and offer an alternative to the increasingly frantic pace of contemporary life and popular culture.

Wall texts and press releases have replaced the tracts and manifestos of the past. Complex and contentious discussions of artworks have been relegated to classrooms and catalog essays, replaced by the shorthand annotations of press releases and exhibition reviews. Though—to cite Marcel Duchamp—explanations explain nothing, ours has become a world of pre-packaged encounters with captioned artworks, designed to intensify the rate and pace of their consumption, in every sense of the word “consumption.” Khedoori’s oeuvre is removed from this frenetic logic. She does not tell you what to think about her works, but instead gives you space to reflect upon them on your own. She has not changed her pace or mode of production, and continues to work alone in her Los Angeles studio. 

While many of her contemporaries have expanded the scope and scale of their operations, Khedoori’s most significant investment is that of time spent making the work. In contrast to many of her peers, her manner of working is neither individualistic nor proprietary. She does not reiterate certain mannerist devices in order to establish a visual identity. Repetitions of formal procedures across different works are inevitably accompanied by their variation, developed in response to the task of representing each specific subject. Her singular approach to painting is most clearly visible in the precision and subtlety of the decisions she makes: from choice of subject matter, to composition, scale, and the varying intensities of control and looseness of her brushwork.

As Aristotle remarks in his Poetics, there is a peculiar delight to be found in observing a minute representation of something in the world, even what we find repugnant. Its contemplation allows us to learn and infer from what we think we already know. Toba Khedoori’s meticulous paintings exert a similar fascination, and produce a similar delight, but in relation to the unremarkable props and backdrops of everyday life. She enables us to move past the immediate trigger of recognition and enter the slow work of cognition. The time and care that she so visibly invests into her own works invites the viewer to make a similar commitment, by slowing down to dwell a little longer in their presence. While visiting her exhibition in Kassel, I found myself drifting back to certain works, simply to prolong the interaction.

In front of "Untitled (stick)” (2005), I noticed the slight upward angle of the line dividing floor from wall. In front of “Untitled (house)” (1995), my thoughts drifted along paths that I can no longer retrace, occasioned by the ambiguous form—half-built and half-destroyed—of the house in question. I noticed how in “Untitled” (2018) and “Untitled” (2019-2020), the depictions of vegetation were suspended within a virtual rectangular frame in the middle of the paper surface, in a subtle recall of human geometry. Time slowed down, and the scope of my thoughts expanded. When I left her exhibition, something of that attentiveness remained with me, drawing me into a more vivid and active relationship with the world outside its walls, leading me to wonder at its most familiar and unremarkable elements and to see them anew, not differently, but with renewed inquisitiveness and consideration.