As blank canvases go, the revitalised spaces of Edinburgh's Fruitmarket Gallery offer more potential than most. The artist responsible for inaugurating the new space is Scottish Turner Prize nominee Karla Black. What she has created is less of a show and more of a full-scale material ambush.
For ‘Karla Black: Sculptures (2001-2021)’, opening on 7 July, the artist is ‘reimagining a retrospective’ armed with 30 existing sculptures and new commissions that respond directly to the Fruitmarket’s rejuvenated spaces.
It was summer 2019 when the Edinburgh gallery last welcomed visitors. Some £4.3m, a doubled footprint and a sustainability driven reimagining by Edinburgh-based Reiach and Hall Architects later, and the gallery has once again opened its doors.
The gallery’s transformation doubles its square footage but also brings the Fruitmarket’s historic building – a former fruit and vegetable warehouse – into active cultural use. In the original structure, the innate rhythms of the rooms and the natural light that floods the upper floor remain intact.
Continuing the theme of curious past lives, the gallery has also expanded into a second historic warehouse, which most recently housed the Electric Circus nightclub. This steel-framed, brick-lined building maintains its rawness and the architects have opened it out by removing the upper floor, reusing the joists and floorboards rather than bringing in new materials. The resulting space will lend itself to theatre and music, spoken word and visual art exhibitions.
Black’s show is a lesson in materiality, and these sculptures are constructed from her signatures: cardboard, sugar paper, polystyrene, polythene, Cellophane, Sellotape, glass, mirror, net, Vaseline, plaster powder, powder paint, medicines, cosmetics and thread. The works, both large and small scale, sprawl across brick walls, appear in gallery windows and spill across floors. The existing works set the stage for the pièce de résistance, Waiver For Shade, a major commission Black created within the new warehouse space in the weeks before it opened.
As Fiona Bradley, director of the Fruitmarket Gallery, says of Black’s show, ‘there is a defiant force to her work – it is demanding and disruptive as well as beautiful and inspiring. It is because of this that we invited her to be the first artist to work in the newly reopened Fruitmarket: we value artistic experimentation and we want her to really challenge the new space.’
The show comes a decade after the Fruitmarket curated Black’s presentation for Scotland in Venice at the 54th International Biennale. But ‘Karla Black: Sculptures (2001–2021) details for a retrospective’ marks their first collaboration on home turf.
For Black, her materials are not just a means to create, but, when activated, form their own vocabulary. ‘I prioritise material experience over language as a way to understand the world or move through it. And I try to make sculpture that, within itself, accepts the fact that the object is a fallacy – that material in this world is only ever either flying together or flying apart,’ Black says in a new book published to coincide with her show at the Fruitmarket. ‘I use both natural and cultural materials the same, for their physical properties. And I use them to keep hold of what I think art really is – a raw, animal creative moment.’
INFORMATION
’Karla Black: Sculptures (2001–2021) details for a retrospective’, 7 July-21 November 2021, fruitmarket.co.uk
ADDRESS
Fruitmarket Gallery
Market St
Edinburgh, EH1 1DF
-
A house near São Paulo combines Brazilian design, convivial living and a strong sense of privacyKG Studio’s JF Residence synthesises the best of contemporary Brazilian design, inside and out, to create a sleek set of spaces for entertaining and relaxing
-
The Zaha Hadid Foundation announces a new programme to support emerging architectsThe Zaha Hadid Scholars Program will fully fund two architecture students per year for the duration of their studies at the American University of Beirut
-
Discover a futuristic bar in Shanghai with mad-scientist energyPenicillin opens in Shanghai with a clinical steel and concrete design by LC Studio alongside its trailblazing, sustainable cocktails
-
What is recycling good for, asks Mika Rottenberg at Hauser & Wirth MenorcaUS-based artist Mika Rottenberg rethinks the possibilities of rubbish in a colourful exhibition, spanning films, drawings and eerily anthropomorphic lamps
-
San Francisco’s controversial monument, the Vaillancourt Fountain, could be facing demolitionThe brutalist fountain is conspicuously absent from renders showing a redeveloped Embarcadero Plaza and people are unhappy about it, including the structure’s 95-year-old designer
-
See the fruits of Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely's creative and romantic union at Hauser & Wirth SomersetAn intimate exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Somerset explores three decades of a creative partnership
-
Technology, art and sculptures of fog: LUMA Arles kicks off the 2025/26 seasonThree different exhibitions at LUMA Arles, in France, delve into history in a celebration of all mediums; Amy Serafin went to explore
-
Inside Yinka Shonibare's first major show in AfricaBritish-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare is showing 15 years of work, from quilts to sculptures, at Fondation H in Madagascar
-
Inside Jack Whitten’s contribution to American contemporary artAs Jack Whitten exhibition ‘Speedchaser’ opens at Hauser & Wirth, London, and before a major retrospective at MoMA opens next year, we explore the American artist's impact
-
Frieze Sculpture takes over Regent’s ParkTwenty-two international artists turn the English gardens into a dream-like landscape and remind us of our inextricable connection to the natural world
-
Harlem-born artist Tschabalala Self’s colourful ode to the landscape of her childhoodTschabalala Self’s new show at Finland's Espoo Museum of Modern Art evokes memories of her upbringing, in vibrant multi-dimensional vignettes
