Karla Black

Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens is proud to present Karla Black’s first solo exhibition in Belgium, opening just before her participation at the 57th Venice Biennale this summer.

The artist creates abstract sculptures, consisting of plaster, pigments and paper that she lays on the floor or hangs from the ceiling to create fragile but also sensual spatial experiences. The final result is not as important as the intuitive process of creating the work and its evolution following the creation entailed by the light in the room and the movements of the visitors surrounding the work.

Karla Black will occupy the whole museum with sculptures created for its particular exhibition spaces. The works are based on the specific architectural features of the museum, such as the size of the room, the position of doors, and the intense play of light in the museum.

Black will navigate through the places by filling rooms from ceiling to floor with pastel-coloured powder, toilet paper, vaseline and eyeshadow, among other everyday materials. Inspired by her previous large-scale floor works – such as her work Nature Does The Easiest Thing for Manifesta 10 – Black will create two new site-specific coloured powder and toilet paper floor works. Her nearly two-dimensional works hanging in front of the walls will investigate how far the concept of sculpture can be stretched before becoming a painting. Furthermore, influenced by Constantin Brâncuși’s sculpture Endless Column from 1938, she is experimenting with her first outdoor sculpture in the central patio of the museum.