Karla Black at the 54th Venice Biennale 2011

Scottish Artist Karla Black had a solo presentation at the 54th International Art Exhibition — la Biennale di Venezia, the world’s largest and most prestigious showcase for contemporary visual arts. The exhibition was curated by The Fruitmarket Gallery and was presented at Palazzo Pisani (S. Marina).

2011 Turner Prize nominee Karla Black presented an exhibition of new abstract sculptures that hovered between energy and mass — pulverised, atomised, piled, layered, supported, suspended and spilling out onto the floor; a mass of colour and material that filled the 15th century Venetian Palazzo Pisani. These ‘almost objects’ were intimately and painstakingly worked in situ by the artist into exquisitely detailed aesthetic forms. While not exactly site-specific, these works were made with their physical and conceptual context in mind.

In this exhibition Black presented forms and compositions in Vaseline and marble dust, sugar paper and eye-shadow, soil, powder paint and plaster, polythene, cellophane and soap, in crumbling, peeling washes or dustings of high key mid-colours like peach, baby blue and pastel pink. Black described these works as being ‘caught between thoughtless gestures and seriously obsessive attempts at beauty’.