In 2011 Outset supported Karla Black's exhibition At Fault, at the Scottish Pavilion of the 54th International Art Exhibition — la Biennale di Venezia. The exhibition was curated by The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh 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.
Karla Black prioritises material experience over language as a way to learn about and understand the world. Her sculptures are rooted in Kleinian psychoanalysis, and in formlessness as it has been understood at specific moments in art history. Inherent in the work is also a lively interest in recent scientific theories about the behaviour of the material world – in particular developments in physics that show how, at quantum level, a particle can be in two places at once. Only when the particle is observed does it settle for a single position. Karla Black is captivated by the idea of the quantum world as a world of possibilities where nothing has yet decided what it is or what it will do.
In this major solo exhibition, commissioned by Scotland + Venice, 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, provoked at least an impetus towards physical response. These sculptures were caught between thoughtless gestures and seriously obsessive attempts at beauty.
Outset supported the acquisition of At Fault, 2011 by Karla Black as part of the Outset Frieze Tate fund.
ON VIEW: 4th June - 27th November 2011
