Karla Black

Pastel-coloured, dense and immersive, Karla Black transforms Kunstraum Dornbirn’s historic assembly hall into a fragile yet monumental landscape. Entitled Safety As A Stance, the sculpture invites visitors to wander through countless hanging strips of lightly coloured toilet paper, floating silhouettes of hemispheres moulded in paper, translucent coloured foils, tied together to form wondrous, graceful shapes, and powdery grounds of plaster and pigment. Black’s work unfolds like a dream of matter in suspension, a terrain of shifting states between raw and finished, ephemeral and monumental.

Everyday materials—soap, bath bombs, make-up beads—scatter across the floor like traces of play, merging with sculptural form, colour and light. Under the title Looking Glass (picture grid), mirrors line the long wall. Some are marked with colourful gestures, multiplying fragments of space and body, recalling both the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles and the ornamental logic of historic garden design. Pastel hues glow in daylight, filling the vast volume with a diffuse, sensorial radiance.

Black’s practice resists permanence. Gypsum is sifted rather than cast, paper hangs loose rather than fixed, surfaces remain open to indeterminacy. Sculpture here is not solid but porous, not definitive but in flux. Her intuitive, material-driven process—layering, knotting, dusting, smearing—creates works that are self-referential yet expansive, formal yet playful, rigorous yet free. In Dornbirn, Black’s unique language of fragility and abundance unfolds with striking clarity: a baroque sensibility abstracted through pastel matter, space, and touch.

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