ART-PRESENTATION: Karla Black

Although officially dubbed a sculptor, Karla’s Black work seems to defy classification, simultaneously occupying the regions of painting, sculpture, and performance. The artist states that her works do not “Point outside of themselves with language”. The desire to incorporate these objects into her work, then, is a physical one these are things she “Can’t help but use”.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery Archive

Karla Black combines traditional artistic materials such as chalk, paper, paint, and plaster with everyday items including eye shadow, earth, ribbon, toilet paper, and cotton wool, Black’s works are at once elaborate and simple, expressive and restrained. They challenge their own medium by being “almost” or “only just” objects with a close affinity to painting, Performance art, and installation. When Karla Black first began showing her work, she held exhibitions but then had to destroy the work afterwards. Such large and fragile objects were difficult to store, and she had no choice but to throw them away. Now she dismantles work but then re-creates it elsewhere. As the artist notes, the “Most important thing about the work is that it prioritizes material experience over language as a way to learn about and understand the world”. Hanging sculptures with contrasting densities, forms, and sizes open up the exhibition  at David Zwirner Gallery, to an irregular, ovoid-shaped work covering over 800 square feet of the floor. Consisting of plaster powder and powder paint, it features interspersed curved shapes in white, pink, and various earth-toned hues. Colored toilet paper delicately divides the sculpture’s surface and lines its perimeter, affording a sense of structure to an otherwise formless substance, while the various textures of the materials add a sense of movement to the space. Her work makes it possible to see affinities between things and possibilities for art today which were for a long time thought to be impossible, the possibility for an aesthetic that is both utopian and materialist, both pictorial and sculptural.

Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 525 West 19th Street, New York, Duration: 27/2-26/3/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidzwirner.com