Karla Black

Modern Art is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new work by Karla Black. This is Black’s fourth solo exhibition with Modern Art.

Karla Black’s exhibition for Modern Art is comprised of a series of new sculptures made from soaked and dried cartridge paper and watercolour inks. Using only red, orange and yellow inks blended together, the works are each bathed in varying shades of pink or peach. The paper is left to soak, and then hung out to dry over various household objects from which the sculptures gain their shapes and forms. As such, Black’s new works are more pared back than is typical of her sculptures, and the exhibition as a whole seems to question what is most necessary and essential in her work, keeping only the bare bones. This economy of means is adopted by Black both through a reflection upon the past two decades of her practice characterised by acceleration, but also because of the material and psychical conditions of living and making that have been redefined by the pandemic.

"Influenced by the bold combinations of color and texture in the work of Lynda Benglis and Helen Frankenthaler, Black mixes unlikely materials that combine and repel: creating caked and chalky surfaces directly on the floor, or on paper sugared with sandy substrates, in a signature palette of muted pinks, sea foam green, yellows, and cornflower blue. Once-primary colors are seemingly bleached out, as though by the sun or chemicals, and replaced by pale Easter hues that have long been stereotyped as feminine. This inference is compounded by Black's sometime use of beauty products, an oblique commentary on women's absence from histories of sculptural production. Unlike Rachel Lachowicz, an American artist who has long used cosmetics as a deliberate feminist strategy in her appropriation sculptures, Black takes an approach that is less conceptual, and more intuitive, redolent of the poetics of William Carlos Williams: 'no ideas but in things.'"

Why should femininity and fragility go together? [Black] asks. And, after all, she points out, it was not so long ago that pink was coded as masculine, and blue feminine, the inverse of the current coding of colors. Which is to say, fragility is a human, not a feminine condition, and the gender of colors is deeply unstable, no matter how ‘natural’ we may think our own gender equations are.”

For the past twenty years, Karla Black has been making sculptures that explore the physical and psychic properties of the materials that populate her everyday life. Black’s sculptures come from modest means: paper, cellophane, cosmetics and other household, ready-to-hand substances (bath bombs, Gaviscon, soil, polystyrene, Sellotape, and Vaseline, for example) are her materials of choice, employed for their visual and tactile properties, as opposed to any overt referential significance. These materials are processed and worked through to the limits of their physical parameters, becoming unrecognizable and utterly unique forms, shapes and structures that hover mid-air from the ceiling, attach to walls or other features of the space, or cover the surface of the ground or walls in chalky, pastel colours. In this way, Black’s sculptures respond to the space they are in; the pre-existing visual and spatial features of the architecture becoming cues for Black’s treatment of it, which can be playful, overwhelming, exploratory and effusive.

sculptures (2001-2021), details for a retrospective, The Fruitmarket, Edinburgh,  7 July 2021 - 24 October 2021

Karla Black: 20 Years, Des Moines Art Centre, IA, USA, 8 February 2020 -17 May 2020 

Festival d’Automne à Paris, 2 venues: - Archives Nationales, École des Beaux-Arts de Paris, France, 2017

54th Venice Biennale, Palazzo Pisani (S. Marina), Venice, Italy, 2011

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