Karen Black

Karen Black is an artist who takes an expansive approach to painting and sculpture. Her work balances the hallmarks of both; gesture, surface and composition, into ambiguous and elliptical responses to what is real, remembered and imagined. Black creates places charged with emotion, placing the figure within by committing to the offer of chance and risk within paint and clay. 

Black’s works are explorations of how juxtapositions could relate to one another, how they may become intertwined through metaphor and an ongoing dialogue with the metaphysical. 

Through her work, she veils and unveils desire and emotion, transforming traditional representations of portraiture toward and away from abstraction. Experimentation is significant within her process, it is where she locates raw connection and intuition. Across her entire span of practice, Black’s consideration of care and gentleness have forged a way toward entirely new and idiosyncratic methods of making.

Black has exhibited work in major Australian institutions including the Art Gallery of NSW, National Gallery of Victoria, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle Art Gallery, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Shepparton Art Museum, Monash University Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Griffith University Art Museum, Gertrude Contemporary, as well as internationally in Tokyo, Taipei, Shanghai, Singapore and Hong Kong. In 2019 she was awarded the Glasshouse / Stonehouse Residency, Chenaud, France and in 2017 was a recipient of the Artspace One Year Studio Program. She has been a finalist in several major prizes including the Archibald and Sir John Sulman Prizes held at the Art Gallery of NSW.

Black’s work is held in public collections such as the National Gallery of Victoria, Australian War Memorial, Shepparton Art Museum, Museum of Brisbane, Griffith University Art Museum, Queensland University of Technology Art Museum, Monash University Museum of Art, Murray Art Museum, Albury, Artbank and the Salsali Private Museum, Dubai. She lives and works on Gadigal Land, Sydney, and is a sessional lecturer in ceramics at the National Art School. Karen Black is represented by Sutton Gallery, Naarm/Melbourne and Ames Yavuz, Gadigal/Sydney, Singapore and London.