Karla Black, sculptures (2001 -2021) details for a retrospective

Karla Black prioritises looking over thinking and doing over speaking, and makes sculpture with a strong material presence. She uses a wide range of substances some more traditionally associated with art than others: paper, paint, plaster and chalk; polystyrene, polythene, cellophane and Sellotape; but also make-up, toiletries, medicines and cleaning products – all manner of gels, powders and pastes. She loves them all for their material qualities, colours and textures and keeps them as close as possible to their raw state, so that they appeal directly to a viewer in the present moment. 

Black last worked with the Fruitmarket for Scotland + Venice in 2011, and we were excited that she agreed to make the new Fruitmarket’s inaugural exhibition, a characteristically ambitious, experimental and artist-centred project to announce our return to the international scene after a period of renovation and expansion. The exhibition extends across the Fruitmarket’s refurbished exhibition galleries and into the new warehouse – a double height, materially resonant twin of our ‘white cube’ exhibition spaces.  

Karla Black: Sculptures 2000-2020 was the first selected survey of Black’s practice in the UK and took as its cues Black’s exhortation to audiences to ask what her sculptures do before wondering what they might mean. It combined new work made in and for The Fruitmarket Gallery with existing sculptures selected to represent the typologies of work Black has been making since 2000. In the new installations, Black brought her understanding of how people relate to the materials she uses to bear on how people relate to space. She worked horizontally in the Fruitmarket’s light and airy upper gallery, spreading a carpet of coloured powder across the floor. In contrast she played with the height of the new warehouse space, hanging painted and powdered cellophane off the beams and coating the floor with reflective Vaseline to bounce light around the space. These works were contextualised within Black’s practice by the existing works, a group of standing and hanging volumes and planes in each of the artist’s signature supports, worked on in her inimitable materials palette. 

This major monograph features extensive photography by the artist and new writing by her, Fiona Bradley and Alison Feris.

This was a limited print run.

Authors: Fiona Bradley, Allison Ferris

Published in 2021

Isbn: 9781908612595

Dimensions: 290 x 220 x 15 mm

203 pages