145 x 165 x 35 cm
Karla Black is a Scottish artist living in Glasgow . Her work draws from a multiplicity of artistic traditions from expressionist painting, land art performance, to formalism. Her large-scale sculptures incorporate modest everyday substances, along with very traditional art-making materials to create abstract forms. Black chooses her media for their tactile aesthetic appeal: the familiarity of the texture of cellophane or the scent of cosmetics bridges the experience of tangible matter with the intimacy of memory or the subconscious. Black’s process is intensely physical and this energy is conveyed through ‘impromptu’ staging of her work; this suggestion of performance psychologically involves the viewer with the making process, provoking instinctive responses to her precarious assemblages. Black’s work evinces childhood memories of cakes and candy floss, of birthdays and ice cream. It is absorptive, immersive and engaging, painterly and sculptural, ephemeral and yet permanent. It always has a fragile appearance and is often fragile, capable of being destroyed by a draught or the actions of a viewer. It teeters on the edge of being and non being. Not Today is essentially a painting on three sheets of transparent plastic suspended from the walls by scotch tape. These materials are typical of Black’s art. Suspended in front of a white wall or even a window, the work is as much about light as it is about colour. The layers of the painting coalesce into one plane when the visitor stands before it and yet as a layered painting it also has actual depth. Black says of her work: “sculpture … can be a pure engulfment and absorption in the material world, when you’re not even aware of yourself, when you have no self consciousness, and you’re not being watched and you’re just purely absorbed in the material world. That is the best possible kind of escape – when you are fully connected to yourself. I think about art as a place to behave, as an escape, not just for me but for the people looking at it,” says Black. Her emphasis is on materials and their behaviour. “My work is just rooted in the physical, it just is a thing; it’s real. You don’t have to think, “What does it represent?” or “What does it mean?” It is just, like, it is here. And you’re here. And it is just that exchange.“
Karla Black is a Scottish artist living in Glasgow . Her work draws from a multiplicity of artistic traditions from expressionist painting, land art performance, to formalism. Her large-scale sculptures incorporate modest everyday substances, along with very traditional art-making materials to create abstract forms. Black chooses her media for their tactile aesthetic appeal: the familiarity of the texture of cellophane or the scent of cosmetics bridges the experience of tangible matter with the intimacy of memory or the subconscious. Black’s process is intensely physical and this energy is conveyed through ‘impromptu’ staging of her work; this suggestion of performance psychologically involves the viewer with the making process, provoking instinctive responses to her precarious assemblages. Black’s work evinces childhood memories of cakes and candy floss, of birthdays and ice cream. It is absorptive, immersive and engaging, painterly and sculptural, ephemeral and yet permanent. It always has a fragile appearance and is often fragile, capable of being destroyed by a draught or the actions of a viewer. It teeters on the edge of being and non being.
The work of Keith Tyson is concerned with an interest in generative systems, and embraces the complexity and interconnectedness of existence...
Epiphany…learnt through hardship is composed of a bronze sculpture depicting the model of the little dancer of Degas, in the pose of a female nude photographed by Edward Weston (Nude, 1936) accompanied by a blue cube...
In 2012, former Guatemalan President José Efran Ros Montt was charged with genocide and crimes against humanity; Regina José Galindo’s video Tierra is a chilling reimagining of the atrocities recounted during his trial...
Bowers’ Radical Hospitality (2015) is a sculptural contradiction: its red and blue neon letters proclaim the words of the title, signaling openness and generosity, while the barbed wires that encircle the words give another message entirely...
Since 2005, Charles Avery has devoted his practice to the perpetual description of a fictional island...
Lynn Hershman Leeson’s genre-bending documentary Strange Culture tells the story of how one man’s personal tragedy turns into persecution by a paranoid, conservative, and overzealous government...
Untitled (rolled up) , is an abstract portrait of Owen Monk, the artist’s father and features an aluminum ring of 56.6 cm in diameter measuring 1.77 cm in circumference, the size of his father...
“BC/AD” (Before Cancer, After Diagnoses) is a video of photographs of the artist’s face dating from early childhood to the month before he died, accompanied by the last diary entries he wrote from April 2004 to July 2005 (entitled “50 Reasons for Getting Out of Bed”), from the period from when he lost his voice, thinking he had laryngitis, through the moment he was diagnosed with lung cancer and the subsequent treatment that was ultimately, ineffective...
The artist writes about her work Borrando la Frontera, a performance done at Tijuana/San Diego border: “I visually erased the train rails that serve as a divider between the US and Mexico...
Architectural details become abstracted renderings in Chris Wiley’s inkjet prints 11 and 20 (both 2012)...
Herculine’s Prophecy by Juliana Huxtable features a kneeling demon-figure on what appears to be a screen-print, placed on a wooden table, which has then been photographed and digitally altered to appear like a book cover, with a title and subtitle across the top, and a poem written across the bottom...
This score is a graphic record of the detailed choreography of one of Anthony McCall’s Landscape for Fire performances...
Masks is a series of abstract paintings by Simon Fujiwara that together form a giant, fragmented portrait of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s face...
Architectural details become abstracted renderings in Chris Wiley’s inkjet prints 11 and 20 (both 2012)...