This exhibition is the most comprehensive to date of the work of Glasgow-based artist Karla Black and comprises an ambitious series of sculptures made specifically for the upper galleries.

Black has attracted attention over recent years for her expansive floor works and remarkable hanging sculptures, created from materials that suggest both a sensory recollection of childhood: powder-paint, crushed chalk and sugar paper; and a distinct feminine association: lipstick, nail varnish and body cream.

The artist said, “The large galleries at Modern Art Oxford will allow me to push the work into the full museum scale that it has been edging towards for the last few years. It can finally become what it really is.”

The artist’s use of cosmetic products and other loose materials, and the processes of her art-making viscerally evoke both the body and the natural world. Many of her works literally ‘wear’ make-up, and the interplay between the cosmetic and surface, form and formlessness, is ever-present. Black’s sculptures appear to be as much a reference to Minimal and performative practices of the late 1960s, and the anti-form works of Eva Hesse and Robert Smithson, as they are to a historical sculptural tradition that resonates as far back as Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Theresa.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue co-published with migros museum, Zürich, Der Kunstverein Hamburg, Inverleith House, Edinburgh and JRP Ringier.