| The Iranian American artist is a rarity: a wildly imaginative innovator with a gift for caricature and visual satire.  Photograph by Amy Harrity for The New Yorker Tala Madani’s work is populated by intensely funny and provocative recurring characters. There are hapless male figures in thrall to their penises; variations on an image called Smiley, which riffs on the ubiquitous smiling-face pop icon; and Shit Mom, a maternal character consisting of excrement, whose body, in one painting, is being eaten by a group of babies. “Why this is not revolting, or even disagreeable, is beyond me,” Calvin Tomkins writes, in an illuminating Profile of Madani from this week’s issue, on the occasion of the artist’s first major museum show in the United States, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. “The beauty of the brushwork and the virtuoso modulation of color and surface must have something to do with it. Whatever the reason, I don’t know of anyone who has been seriously offended by Shit Mom—not publicly, anyway. ‘There was really not much criticism,’ Madani said. ‘I wish there had been more.’ ” Tomkins examines how Madani’s life story and vision have contributed to her joining, at the age of forty-one, the list of art history’s great caricaturists. Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
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