Karla Black’s art looks like it’s disintegrating. In the last room of the former Turner Prize nominee’s show, the floor is littered with balls of pink fluff and frittered filaments of baby blue paper. There’s a puddle where it looks like a work has been left to evaporate, there are remnants of paint on the wall. Shredded paper and wool works hang from the ceiling, all pink and gold. Everything looks like it will fall apart if you stare at it for too long.
Other works are painted on glass and embedded in white mounds of clay on the ground – like car windows or French doors in a surreal dream. They’re all daubed and blobbed with finger marks, oranges and yellows. They too look worryingly fragile.
There’s a childish naivety to Black’s work here, as if a kindergarten art classroom had been left to disintegrate for centuries. The works are lovely, sure, but what makes the show really click is the way that all this prettiness is swamped in a nervous aura of fragility that makes Black’s art as tense as it is cute.
@eddyfrankel
