Karla Black — A Lightness That Endures
- Venetia Kapernekas
- May 4
- 5 min read
Updated: May 11
Opening Viewing Day: Rodder Gallery, New York — May 2026
In early May, New York moves between intensity and departure. The auction houses set their rhythm, collectors circulate, and much of the art world begins its gradual shift toward the Venice Biennale. It is a moment defined as much by movement as by presence.
Into this moment, Karla Black comes from Glasgow to Rodder Gallery, a Turner Prize–nominated artist whose work unfolds between material sensitivity and a sustained dialogue with the histories of painting and form. Over recent years, her presence in the United States has remained unexpectedly quiet, making this exhibition feel less like an introduction than a return, one that brings into focus the depth and continuity of her practice.
Each day, from 10 am to 4 pm, she worked with a steady, almost devotional focus, placing, reconsidering, allowing materials to settle into relation within the two rooms of Rodder Gallery. This was not a process that announced itself. It unfolded quietly, held within the rhythm of the space. Observed at a distance, often through fragments and images arriving over those days, one becomes aware of a sustained concentration, a practice carried in a single breath toward its form. What emerged was not imposed, but allowed, a sculptural environment shaped through duration, attention, and restraint.
I first encountered her work years ago in Cologne, on a rainy afternoon, walking into Galerie Gisela Captain, still the gallery that represents her, an almost weightless sculpture held in suspension against the grey of the day outside. It remained.
Just behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the magnolia trees are already at the edge of dispersal, petals opening fully, then loosening, falling almost as quickly as they arrive. For a brief moment, the city holds a field of pink that is both present and already passing. It is difficult not to carry this condition into the work itself.
Karla Black's materials do not settle into stable form so much as they gather, hover, and begin to give way. Often working with paper, powdered pigment and plaster, cosmetics, cellophane, polythene, tape, powdered paint, she allows them to remain visibly provisional, never fully fixed, always on the verge of change. Her approach resists hierarchy. Materials remain in open relation, without precedence, without fixed value.
In a text published to coincide with her retrospective at the Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, she articulates what this process holds: 'I prioritise material experience over language as a way to understand the world or move through it. And I try to make sculpture that, within itself, accepts the fact that the object is a fallacy — that material in this world is only ever either flying together or flying apart.' And elsewhere, with equal directness: 'I use both natural and cultural materials the same, for their physical properties. And I use them to keep hold of what I think art really is — a raw, animal creative moment.'
She does not speak of meaning as something applied to the work, but of making as a form of thinking. Materials do not illustrate, they are handled, shifted, and allowed to behave. Meaning forms through contact, through time. Her voice offers a way into this process through conversations at the Des Moines Art Center and at the Fruitmarket in Edinburgh.
At Gagosian in Chelsea, where Helen Frankenthaler's The Moment and the Distance is currently on view, one becomes aware of how colour can open space rather than define it. It spreads, stains, and hovers, resisting resolution into fixed image, allowing form to remain fluid, almost provisional. In Karla Black's sculptures, that sensibility shifts from painting into material. Colour is no longer held within the surface, it becomes the substance itself, dispersed through powder, pigment, and gesture. It gathers, settles, and reappears, never fully fixing into image.
Across Fifth Avenue, inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Agnes Northrop's Luminous Garden assembles light through fragments, a continuous field of colour held together through the labour of many hands. Here, at Rodder Gallery, that logic is quietly reversed. What is constructed there through accumulation is here released, dispersed into space, allowed to remain unresolved. The two works do not speak loudly to one another. But the distance between them, one holding, one letting go, feels present.
In the mirrored surfaces of the work, this movement becomes particularly clear. The image does not return as expected, it is absorbed, interrupted, dispersed. Mirrors were central to the Rococo interior as instruments of light, enlivening the aesthetic lightness of that style. Here they shift function entirely, they no longer stabilise space, but unsettle it. What they reflect is already in the process of dispersal.
Black's work moves in proximity to a lineage that includes Helen Frankenthaler, Eva Hesse, and Richard Tuttle, and in spatial terms recalls the dispersed propositions of Barry Le Va, a connection she has articulated notably in conversation at the Fruitmarket. Yet these affinities do not resolve into reference. They remain absorbed, held lightly within a language that is distinctly her own.
From within this sustained instability, another register begins to emerge, one that has been described as a return to a Rococo sensibility, as Danielle Thom argued in her 2022 essay The Return of Rococo in Contemporary Culture for ArtReview. Not as a style to be named, but as something felt, a movement toward lightness, toward surface, toward what is fleeting, emerging at moments when the world itself feels most unsettled. In its earlier form, Rococo carried within it a delicate proximity to decay, a beauty aware of its own fragility, holding pleasure alongside uncertainty.
One might think of the drifting surfaces of Fragonard, where movement, fabric, and air dissolve into one another. Yet in Black's work this sensibility is reduced further, almost to its essence. What was once image becomes material. What was depicted is now held in suspension. While painters such as Flora Yukhnovich return to these forms through image, here they remain unresolved, no longer painted, but dispersed.
In Karla Black's sculptures, that lightness is neither decorative nor ironic. It hovers, it gathers, it gives way, offering not resolution, but a space in which breath, or the possibility of dreaming, can quietly persist. This lightness is exact, held under tension. What disperses does not dissolve, it remains unresolved, yet sustained.
Now, as the work settles into the space of Rodder Gallery, it does not assert itself against the city, but opens toward it. The boundaries between surface and space, between interior and exterior, remain permeable.
Nothing is fully held. Nothing is fully returned.
A lightness that does not escape, but endures.
By Venetia Kapernekas
4th May, 2026
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