Karla Black

Galleria Raffaella Cortese is pleased to present the second solo show by Karla Black in Milan after the one in 2014.The Scottish artist will realize new sculptural works expressly conceived for the three exhibition spaces in via stradella 1-4-7.

Black is regarded as one of the pioneering contemporary artists of her generation practicing a kind of lyrical autonomous sculpture, influenced by psychoanalysis and feminism in its impact on visual art. Her works explore material and physical experience as a way of communicating and understanding the world around us. She is interested in ideas of play and early childhood learning as well as the raw creative moment when art comes into being. Black’s work draws from a multiplicity of artistic traditions from expressionist painting, land art, performance, to formalism.

For her exhibition at the gallery, 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.