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. Black connects working on this horizontal plane to the floor bound years of early childhood, citing the exploration of this experience in the psychoanalytic texts of Melanie Klein as influences on her process. Black’s sculptures fix the moment of creation itself, and in doing so build on a legacy of modern art that includes Lynda Benglis’s pours and Helen Frankenthaler’s stains. This way of working might be described as automatic, guided mostly by Black’s unconscious intuition and her response to the pre-existing visual and spatial features of the architecture surrounding them, which can be playful, overwhelming, exploratory and effusive.

Karla Black was born in 1972 in Alexandria, Scotland, and lives and works in Glasgow. She has mounted recent solo exhibitions at Bechtler Stiftung (2024); Des Moines Art Center (2020); Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2019); The Power Plant, Toronto (2018); Museum DhondtDhaenens, Deurle (2017); and Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich (2016). In 2011, she was nominated for the Turner Prize. The same year, she represented Scotland at the 54th Venice Biennale. In 2021, Black inaugurated Edinburgh’s renovated Fruitmarket Gallery with the survey exhibition sculptures (2001 – 2021): details for a retrospective. Her works are held in collections including Centre Pompidou, Paris; Dallas Museum of Art; Des Moines Art Center; Kunstmuseum Den Haag; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; and Tate, London.