
Capitain Petzel is pleased to announce the second solo exhibition of artist Karla Black at the Berlin gallery, running from February 17 to April 14, 2018. Her show is taking place on the ground floor of the gallery’s glass encased exhibition space. At the same time, artist, filmmaker and musician Luke Fowler is presenting his first exhibition at the gallery, entitled Electro-Pythagorus (a portrait of Martin Bartlett), which will be on view in the lower exhibition space.
Karla Black has created a unique artistic language using a mix of traditional and unconventional materials such as cellophane, sugar paper, plaster powder and cosmetic products. Her sculptural works, which are often room-filling and highly colourful, operate between installation, painting and performance art, while ultimately and very definitely claiming to be separate, autonomous sculptures.
Her exhibition at Capitain Petzel will feature new works that concentrate specifically on the mark-making in her sculptural practice through colour and light.
For the show the artist has realised various works made of Vaseline mixed with paint and then sealed between glass screens. There are two freestanding sculptures with wooden bases concealed inside clay and three new works consisting of wooden doors complete with glass mounts. There are hanging sculptures composed of the same materials. The main piece of the show extends over the large storefront windows and the door of the gallery. Here, Black worked directly on the glass by drawing lines and shapes with lipstick that she then blended and smudged with her hands. Further elements are hanging sculptures made of acrylic paint, towels coloured with bath bombs, wool, toilet paper and crystals.
Karla Black (born 1972 in Alexandria, UK) lives and works in Glasgow. In 2011 she represented Scotland at the 54th Venice Biennale, and in the same year she was nominated for the Turner Prize. Her work has been the subject of numerous international solo and group exhibitions.
On the occasion of the opening of the exhibitions Luke Fowler will perform an exclusive concert with the musicians Carl Ludwig Hübsch and Biliana Voutchkova on February 17, 2018 at Kosmetiksalon Babette, Karl-Marx-Allee 36 in Berlin-Mitte.
Karla Black creates her abstract, immersive sculptures by unconventionally combining materials such as paper, cellophane and paint with the likes of Vaseline, lipstick, sugar paper, cotton wool, earth, toothpaste or gold. Tactile, transparent materials are interspersed with natural and cosmetic substances, smudged and blurred by hand, or lightly sprinkled. Expanding the parameters of sculpture, Black creates ephemeral worlds, affective layered landscapes, at once monumental but also weightless. These room-filling works (often installed by Black herself) are spread across the floor or suspended from the ceiling to create entire environments. Despite their site-specificity, they are considered by her to be self-contained sculptures.

Capitain Petzel is a joint venture between Cologne’s Galerie Gisela Capitain and New York’s Petzel Gallery. Established in 2008, it occupies the Soviet-era modernist gallery space of the former Kunst im Heim on central Berlin’s iconic Karl-Marx-Allee.

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