Karla Black at GoMA

Karla Black will present major new sculptures in the grand ground floor of the Gallery of Modern Art’s exhibition space. Black is an artist who has achieved increasing international acclaim and attention in recent years, with the past two years showing a substantial shift in the scale and ambition of her work.

Black has exhibited nationally and internationally, recently with major presentations at Scotland and Venice, 54th Venice Biennale, Venice and the Turner Prize exhibition at the Baltic, Gateshead (both 2011). Black makes process-based sculptural works, often using familiar domestic materials such as Vaseline, talcum powder and soap. The site specific sculptures are often fleeting, with unstable surfaces of powder, sawdust and soil existing only for the duration of the exhibition.

Black’s works ranges from the small scale to the monumental, from delicate suspended paper pieces to giant swathes of cellophane. The works appear as artefacts, deeply imprinted with movement in their application. Powders, creams and sprays are rubbed and sprinkled onto giant swathes of cellophane and paper. Typically the materials are used in their raw states with the domestic and familiar placed beside harder, more structural objects more commonly used in sculpture. These are works of sheer materiality, situated between performance, painting and sculpture and explore the means through which we think, feel, communicate and relate.

Text supplied by third party.