Karla Black

Raffaella Cortese is proud to present the first solo show by Karla Black at the gallery. Karla Blackʼs work is inspired by abstract expressionism and performance art and creates a highly singular path. The artist realizes large scale sculptures combining typical art materials, such as plaster, glass, polythene and paper and everyday materials including cosmetics, soap, dirt, vaseline. In a neverending process of experimenting, Karla Black creates with matter, by highlighting the different textures. Her works remind of some kind of performance and while they seem impermanent and formless, they are striving to keep their aesthetic intact 'forever' in some or various ways.

For her exhibition at the gallery, Karla Black creates a series of free-standing and hanging sculptures connected by a yellow powder line. The show is basically a study in colour. The artist examines, both in terms of colour and form, how close to similarity things can be, while still managing to be utterly different. The works, while being very closely connected in terms of what they look like, reflect the way that Blackʼs work skirts between mediums while remaining resolutely autonomous sculpture. It is almost painting, almost installation, almost performance art but, always, in the end, most definitely sculpture. The artist rethinks the expressive gesture and plays with the different features of materials. In this way, she produces a cosmogony of expanded works, light and transparent ones, suspended from the ceiling, or coloured accumulations of powder and paper thickening on the floor.

This exhibition at Raffaella Cortese Gallery presents a group of works from the studio that is fresh, playful and also poetic.

Recent works include various big public installations: Color Jam in Chicago, Flooded Chambers Maid in Madison Square Park NYC, and the seminal site specific work at the Cristal Palace/ Reina Sophia in Madrid titled Peer Out to See. All of these works bridge painting, sculpture, and architecture.

Karla Black

artist:
Karla Black