Gordon Bennett, Karen Black and Kate Smith in Thresholds at Murray Art Museum Albury
Artworks by Gordon Bennett, Karen Black and Kate Smith are included in the group exhibition Thresholds currently on show at the Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA), NSW.
This exhibition showcases recent museum acquisitions, placing new works in dialogue with longstanding fixtures that represent the collection’s strengths. Thresholds considers to a process-led development of collecting and the variables of working with collections, contemplating where artworks can exist as portals to an ever-expanding world of unexpected sites and unanticipated tangents.
Thresholds Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA), NSW 23 February – 10 June 2024
Once More With Feeling features new and existing works by Karen Black, Georgia Spain, Cybele Cox and Michelle Ussher.
The exhibition sets out to investigate the articulation of bodies, the relationship between the human form and culture, femininity, sexuality, theatre and ritual. Predominantly traversing sculpture, painting and sound, there is a quest to represent and challenge understandings of femininity – particularly the shapes, expressions and actions that are associated with female bodies.
Once More With Feeling 3 June – 13 August 2023 Karen Black, Georgia Spain, Cybele Cox and Michelle Ussher. Ngununggula, Retford Park, Southern Highlands Regional Gallery
Hosted by Res Artis and Gertrude Contemporary in celebration of the Stonehouse-Glasshouse Residency program, Karen Black launches her new publication with Virginia Leonard.⠀
Stonehouse-Glasshouse Residency is a program developed in collaboration between Antje and Andrew Géczy, and Res Artis benefactors Michael Schwarz and David Clouston. In 2019, Virginia Leonard and Karen Black undertook the residency.
Karen Black named as finalist in 2021 Archibald Prize
Karen Black has been announced as a finalist in the 2021 Archibald Prize. Black’s entry is a timely portrait of renowned epidemiologist and professor of global biosecurity at the UNSW’s Kirby Institute, Professor Chandini Raina Macintyre. Professor Macintyre emigrated to Australia with her Sri Lankan Tamil family when she was nine, and is now recognised as a world expert in emerging infectious diseases. Black’s forthcoming solo exhibition at Sutton Gallery, ‘Arepo’, opens in July.
Karen Black has been selected as a finalist in the prestigious Archibald Prize for her painting of fellow artist and poet, the late Madonna Staunton, whose practice spanned five decades and included writing, collage, assemblage and painting. ⠀ ⠀ She says, “I’d wanted to paint Madonna since 2014 after seeing her paintings at QAGOMA. I felt she’d been overlooked as one of our great women artists and wanted to put her in the spotlight. When I discovered she was the same age as my mother and also had dementia, it gave me a more personal reason to meet her. I visited her in the nursing home and was inspired to see her still working on various paintings. She was still outspoken, yet I could see a certain introspect in her manner, especially her eyes.⠀ ⠀ She sat on her bed talking, so I situated the painting in her room. When I mixed the paint on the canvas a blob of paint hung over her eye, giving the portrait that feeling of introspection I’d recognised. I used shapes, referencing her assemblages and collages and painted it in the pale colours she was wearing on the day. It reminded me of time fading away.⠀ ⠀ We lost Madonna on 16th December 2019.”⠀ ⠀
Karen Black and Virginia Leonard will present The Cook and Her Driver at Gertrude Glasshouse, opening Thursday 30 January at 6pm. The exhibition is an outcome from Black’s time at the Stonehouse / Glasshouse Residency, an invitational international residency opportunity in Chenaud, located in the south west of France.
Catherine Bell and Karen Black at Museum of Brisbane
Catherine Bell and Karen Black are included in New Woman, an exhibition celebrating Brisbane’s most significant and ground-breaking female artists over the past 100 years.
New Woman Museum of Brisbane 13 September, 2019 – 15 March, 2020
