Our use of cookies

We use cookies to help our site function and to understand how we can improve our content.

Before you choose, you can read more about the cookies we use on our cookies page.

Karla Black

Artist stands before a white fireplace in front of a gold framed mirror and surrounded by lush green plants
Karla Black. Photo credit: Emile Holba

Visual Arts recipient 2025

Karla Black (born 1972) creates sculptural works that skirt close to the mediums of painting, installation, performance and installation. Her immersive exhibition set-ups are influenced by both the surrounding architecture and her intuitive, playful response to the world, with the resulting sculptures highlighting the narrow line between the fragile and the strong, the ephemeral and the permanent. 

Her work uses traditional art materials, such as acrylic paint, pigment and plaster, alongside everyday items like soap, make-up, or cotton wool, giving her an almost endless palette. Black does not acknowledge any hierarchy of materials, or any real difference between culture and nature. The work prioritises material experience above language as a way to connect to and understand the world. The hope is for an absorption and engulfment in material abstraction that can bring about physical and mental freedom for the viewer. 

Black currently lives and works in Glasgow, UK. She represented Scotland at the 57th Venice Biennale (2011) and her work was exhibited at Manifesta 10 at St Petersburg (2014). Her immersive, often site-specific sculptures have been shown at numerous solo exhibitions, for example at the Bechtler Foundation, Uster (2024), New Art Gallery Walsall (2023), Modern Art Gallery, London (2022), Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2021), Des Moines Art Centre (2020), Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2019), Le Festival d’Automne, Paris (2017), Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle (2017), Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2016), Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2016), Gemeentemuseum, The Hague (2013), Dallas Museum of Art (2012) and Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow (2012). 

“Receiving a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists at this point in my career will help safeguard the experimental nature and freedom of my sculptural practice. Mid-career and middle-age is a notoriously difficult time for artists, especially for women and mothers. This time, for me, coincides with a transitioning art world and market that is in a strangely conventional and static, fearful phase, as a defensive stance against the existential threats of a turbulent world order and economy. However, the experimental nature of the arts is still a litmus test for freedom in any society and is the arena in which I wish to continue to work and evolve. The award is protective for me, and will insulate my creativity at a difficult time.”

Karla Black 
More about Karla Black

Examples of work

  • THE ACADEMY, 2023. Photo credit: Ilona Zielinska.
  • HOME FROM THE ACADEMY, 2023. Photo credit: Ilona Zielinska.
  • THE ACADEMY (EARLIER), 2024. Photo credit: Flavio Karrer.
  • SAFETY AS A STANCE, 2025. Photo credit: Gunter Richard Wett.