We are pleased to present Karen Black’s seventh solo exhibition with Sutton Gallery, A ring for a squared circle. Featuring a suite of new paintings and ceramic sculptures, this exhibition highlights the artist’s continued exploration of the intangible within contemporary aesthetics, embedding themes of vulnerability, spontaneity and desire throughout.

Images appear and disappear at an irregular tempo within Black’s work. Through generous daubing, playful brushwork and an iterant process of reworking and re-composition, her artworks habitually parse out submerged narratives and fragments of histories. Black carefully invokes the viscosity of oil paint, simultaneously traversing and constituting the surface’s terrain. A dissonant scenography of landscapes, objects, figures and interiors emerges quietly within the richly textured canvas and ceramic planes.

This unique image-making technique is engendered by a dialogic approach to composition, whereby the artist carefully frames an exchange of both audial and visual language. Here, figurative elements unravel through a temporal process of looking and deduction, as the elapsing of time allows for perceptible forms to materialise out of the recesses of the painted surface and the caverns of sculpture’s contours. These labile expressions of intimacy ultimately lay bare a proximate, resounding sense of Black in the studio–an artist automatically making in response to past conversations, places, memories and speculations.

I am a knitted blanket
On thin ice
Swept away
By a risky murmur
Around the waterfall
Stranger things have happened

Racing the rain
Passing by a passer by
The rider 
On mountain head
With a silver tongue
For a floating cloud

A three-point landing
In a ring for a squared circle 
Insomnia
At the nightclub
Insomnia
At the campsite

– Curtis Black