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“Biscuits,” the first North American survey of Iranian-American artist Tala Madani, was awfully inviting: depicted in stark caricature form, giant splayed legs reveal a petite anus glowing above dangling testicles, welcoming viewers as they descended from the central steps of the Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA).

The New Landscape (2022) stood out from the more than 125 works. At the bottom—no pun intended—of the composition, three puny acolytes float in a black space as they crouch and extend reverent fecal offerings to the contrasting white vista of male legs. Madani teases traditional Western landscape paintings that have objectified the naked female figure. Inverting the art historical association of women with beautiful fertile lands and voluptuous hills, she lampoons the male form in a colorless void.

Elsewhere, a tableau of 12 paintings from Madani’s Cake Men series foregrounded her work’s earliest archetype—a bald and bearded man. The cake men are cartoonish and unkempt. Two shirtless men gawk from each side of a boxer-clad torso (Short Cake, 2007), one stands before a towering phallic cake (Rising Flame, 2006), and another cake smashes another man (Caked, 2005). Their figures never fully fit the small frames of each canvas, matching their egos but belittling their presence. Reacting to the cultural and social transgressions she observed between men, Madani scrutinizes the male ego and ridicules machismo.

The Shit Mom series—housed in an adjacent room—features the artist’s first female archetype: a sludgy, maternal figure composed of fecal brown brushstrokes. The Shit Mom room was immersive: all four walls were lined in the vinyl work Wallpaper with Shit Mom (2022), an illustrated pattern of enlarged, viridescent foliage. Situated high on the center wall, the oil painting Fan with Drips (2022) depicts a spinning brown fan that appears to spew muck off the canvas and onto the wallpaper. The soiled environs were an appropriate backdrop for works like Shit Mom: Feedback (2021). A headless shit mom slouches over a white dining table in a pool of sludge, where four shit candles flank a shit-head centerpiece. The series not only achieves the representation of women without painting the female body but underscores the impossible expectations of motherhood; Madani’s shit mom feels frustrated, destroyed, and exhausted.

Grim yet mirthful sound effects from Madani’s animations, which began in 2007, emanated from a separate space. In the single-channel video Mr. Time (2018), produced in paint and captured in stop-motion, a cake man travels up and down between three sets of escalators, while a troop of five blind men trots across to repeatedly push him off, simultaneously activating a timeclock that spins wildly from above each time. The man is unperturbed by his assailants and idiotically subjects himself to more abuse. Decapitated and armless, even his appendages persist as they inch their way up the escalator, leaving a vivid trail of blood. As with all of the animations in the room, the macabre repetition and persistence of violence were more unsettling than the death or blood.

As a reprieve from the bodily mutilation, indecent exposure, and flagrant acts of emission, Madani created the new series Cloud Mommies (2022) specifically for “Biscuits.” In the show’s largest and furthest room, a wistful and maternal cloud figure wandered throughout a baby-blue sky in seven massive oil paintings. The cloud mom hovers above doodles blended into the sky, such as stick figures of children cloud-spotting on ladders in Cloud Mommy: Ladder, or markings of X’s and O’s in Cloud Mommy: XOXO, a nod to tic-tac-toe, but also the abbreviation for hugs and kisses. Moving away from the powerlessness of the shit mom, this new atmospheric specter is affectionate and nurturing, and there is optimism projected in motherhood.

“Biscuits” presented Madani’s characters in their own times and in their own magical, subliminal realms of mayhem, motherhood, and meaning. It also showed their inherent crossovers; they are interconnected in their hilarity, imagination, and unexpectedness. It will be fascinating to see what characters and series will join them in the next phase of the Madani multiverse.