Artist biography

Karen Black works across painting and sculpture, traversing the line between abstraction and figuration to broach the scope of human relations. Atmospheric, metamorphic, and transitional, Black’s vivid compositions produce novel representations of the body, figured as a subject in flux and a pliable framing device that entangles latent historical narratives, mythologies, and personal experiences.

Having worked as a costume designer for the theatre and opera, Black’s interdisciplinary practice employs a painterly language that holds space for ambiguity and uncertainty. Together with an idiosyncratic approach to sculpture characterised by elements of chance and intuition in the studio process, Black’s paintings feature thick impasto and energetic brushstrokes as a means to fracture pictorial space and disrupt traditional delineations between the figure and the inhabited world. Importantly, Black understands the painted surface as akin to the public sphere: a fluid zone where the self is inscribed, constructed, and navigated.

Born in Brisbane, 1961, Karen Black lives and works in Sydney, NSW, where she is a Sessional Lecturer at the National Art School. Since receiving a Bachelor of Fine Art from the Queensland College of Art in 2011, Black has exhibited widely across Australasia. Her work has been included in important institutional surveys, including The Intelligence of Painting, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2025); Thin Skin, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne (2023); undo the day, National Art School Gallery, Sydney (2023); Once more with feeling, Ngununggula, Southern Highlands, NSW (2023); Art in Conflict, Australian War Memorial, Canberra (2022); Painting. More Painting, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2016), among others. In 2025, Black presented a solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, as the recipient of the annual NGV x MECCA Holiday Commission.

Black has undertaken residencies across Australia and Europe, such as the prestigious Glasshouse/Stonehouse Residency in Chenaud, France (2019); Flack Studios Ace Hotel residency (2022), and the Artspace Studio Residency, Sydney (2017). She has been a finalist in multiple national art awards, including the prestigious Archibald, Wynne, and Sir John Sulman prizes several times, organised by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.

Examples of Black’s painting and sculpture are found in significant public collections in Australia and Asia, including the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Australian War Memorial, Canberra; Shepparton Art Museum, Shepparton; Museum of Brisbane, Brisbane; Ipswich Art Gallery, Ipswich; Griffith University Art Museum; Brisbane; Queensland University of Technology Art Museum, Brisbane; Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne; Artbank, Australia; and the Salsali Private Museum, Dubai.