ART CITIES:Milan-Karla Black

Karla Black is considered to be a pioneer sculptor. Using a mix of traditional and unusual materials such as cellophane, sugar paper, plaster powder and cosmetic products she has created a unique visual language. Her sculptural works, which are often room-filling and highly colourful, operate on the border between installation, painting and performance art, while being defined quite definitely as sculptures.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galleria Raffaella Cortese Archive

Karla Black in her solo exhibition at Galleria Raffaella Cortese, has realized new sculptural works expressly conceived for the three exhibition spaces of the Gallery. For her exhibition, Black creates a series of abstract sculptures carefully arranged on the floor or suspended from the ceiling using a combination of everyday materials including powder, cotton wool along with more traditional media such as plaster, chalk, acrylic paint, paper, cellophane. In a process of experimenting and playing with specific textures she transforms the different materials into elegant and ephemeral objects. Delicate, messy, sensuous, and visceral, they testify to a physical experience of the world that lies beyond metaphorical and symbolic references in a never-ending process of experimenting. Karla Black is a Glasgow based artist who has had huge success in recent years with her abstract sculptures. She was nominated for the Turner prize in 2011 and represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale in the same year. Black states: “It was always the physical, material world that I’m drawn to… While there are ideas about psychological and emotional developmental processes held within the sculptures I make, the things themselves are actual physical explorations into thinking, feeling, communicating and relating”. Her works are site specific or site-responsive, there is a curiosity around form and what its limitations are. Time is of course particularly relevant, these works are temporary, and the instability of the materials mean the works are not always rigid enough to move or interrupt. Gravity plays a very important role. Evidence of the maker is present and the materials tell us that this work has been made very recently. Karla Black attempts to connect elements of sculpture and painting. She has said that she wants to bring floating forms and colour to eye level and acknowledges that the traditional format for this is painting. However there is a need to move beyond the restrictions of the canvas and encounter the third dimension, spatiality is clearly a dominant concern. Like Eva Hesse and Richard Serra, the artist too questions the limitations of sculpture and seeks to extend those limitations. She has stated that she as a student as Glasgow School of Art, sculpture was defined to her as something that can stand up by its self. Challenging this definition has become a concern within Black’s work.

Info: Galleria Raffaella Cortese, via Stradella 1, via Stradella 4 & via Stradella 7, Milan, Duration: 23/11/16-25/2/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-13:00 & 15:00-19:30, www.galleriaraffaellacortese.com