Not Today

2013 - Painting (Painting)

145 x 165 x 35 cm

Karla Black

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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.“

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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.

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Colors:

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• fragile.s.02
• familiar.a.01
• material.a.02
• escape.v.05
• engulf.v.02
• everyday.s.03
• feminism
• british
• scottish contemporary artists