Karla Black: Sculptures with paintings by Bet Low (1924-2007)
Until February 14; Inverleith House, Edinburgh

Karla Black is a busy woman; her exhibition at Inverleith House comes hot on the heels of solo shows in Oxford, Hamburg and Zurich, all of which take her career up another notch. She’s a canny artist whose work operates on many levels; from a basis in intuitive, tactile appeal she makes knowing references to a whole range of 20th century art issues.

Followers of Black’s work will recognise the wide expanses of plaster powder, sieved across the floor like icing sugar and decorated with odd patches of colour. They’ll be familiar with the swathes of sugar paper suspended from ribbons, in a permanent state of sagging and tearing; and with the crumpled towers of cardboard, collapsing in on themselves under the weight of still-wet paint, foundation or eye-shadow.

But the first work in the show is something of a departure. Appropriately for a gallery sited inside Edinburgh’s botanical gardens, Black has imported a vast chunk of top-soil, six inches high, and on top of it she has scattered her signature scraps and heaps of powdery pink, blue and yellow.

Black has previously voiced her dismay that gender is so often mentioned in discussions of her work. Frankly, with all those pastel colours and girly make-up, she doesn’t make it easy to avoid. But this big, lumpy, chunky dirt mixes things up a little more. It also makes explicit her interest in Land Art, a strong element of Black’s work which is usually tucked discretely behind the façade of urban, domestic materials. Her new material has proved something of a challenge though: the perky seedlings visible at the exhibition’s opening were not of the artist’s design.

There is a lightness (often in tension with an opposing heaviness) in Black’s work which is rarely matched elsewhere. Polythene floats with the tiniest traces of blue chalk harboured in its crevices. Powder is impossibly bright on the floor, the finger prints at its edges full of childish pleasure. Paint itself is too heavy for many of her works, dragging them down to the ground in front of our eyes. Only magic seems to prevent the spectacular cliffs of powder in the basement from tumbling into dust.

One room of this exhibition is devoted to the late Glasgow painter Bet Low, who studied under James Cowie, and was championed in her early days by Scottish Colourist JD Fergusson. She is best known for her powerful paintings of the light and landscape of the Orkney islands, but they are not shown at their best here. Alongside Black’s work, they appear heavy and dark. I have seen beautifully ethereal works by Low which would hit the right note in this pairing, but alas, they are not here.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 22.11.09