Karla Black
Scotland + Venice
4 June – 27 November 2011
Palazzo Pisani (S.Marina) Calle de le Erbe, Cannaregio 6103
Scotland + Venice 2011 Curated by The Fruitmarket Gallery

Hovering between energy and mass in the eight rooms of the Palazzo Pisani (S. Marina) is a solo exhibition of brand new ‘almost objects’ by the Scottish artist Karla Black. Intimately and painstakingly worked in situ into exquisitely detailed aesthetic forms, a still raw vastness of pure material and colour fills this 15th-century Venetian palace. These abstract sculptures – pulverised, atomised, piled, layered, supported, suspended and spilled out onto the floor – offer a visceral experience of absorption in the material world.

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 and curated by The Fruitmarket Gallery, 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, provoke at least an impetus towards physical response. These sculptures are caught between thoughtless gestures and seriously obsessive attempts at beauty.

Opening Hours / Orario 10am – 6pm (closed Mondays / chiuso il lunedi) Free entry / Ingresso gratuito

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Foto: Cosmin Năsui

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Modernism.ro vă prezintă, în premieră, un serial dedicat expozițiilor pavilioanelor naționale și evenimentelor paralele și dar și a celor colaterale ale Bienalei de Artă de la Veneția, unul dintre cele mai importante evenimente europene de artă contemporană.

Mulțumim Institutului Român de Cultură şi Cercetare Umanistică de la Veneția și ICR București pentru suportul și sprijinul acordat la realizarea acestui serial.