Karen Black: Beautiful Tragedies

The work of Karen Black, who has been painting intensely since graduating from Griffith University Queensland College of Art in 2011, has always been steeped in political and social complexity, but bound by the will of her material. In 2013 she was painting stories of illegal immigrant women arriving by boat. More recent research was based on essays, publications and videos referencing the work of Syrian/American architect and writer Lina Sergie, who works as a humanitarian advocate for displaced children and women in war-torn places.

Black’s work is a research-led practice. She garners information and builds up the pathos and pain, as she concomitantly layers the painting surfaces. There is an apparent craquelure on the surface of some of her oil on wood paintings that reminds us of Goya’s black paintings on the walls of his home. Using tar, Goya’s dark surfaces quickly became decayed and cracked. Likewise, there is a Romantic horror in Black’s work, which hints at miseries and alienations outside middle class Australian habits. Always, though, there is a passion for materials. She says: “Paint feels beautiful. It’s like playing with ice cream. It lets me down in dramatic ways. It is better than me – it often makes its own decisions.” Alongside the painful pleasures of the Romantic sublime, there is also a Modernist whimsy to her painterly hand. Splotches of colour are the fragments of narrative disruption that were so particular to the early 20th century period of painting. Indeed she asserts her love for “Otto Dix, Max Beckman, Käthe Kollwitz … and of course I am always looking at the work of Goya, Joan Mitchell and Arshile Gorky.’

Unwieldy forms, seemingly un-composed, are united by colour and structural form that could best be described as well-aggregated. Figures float, yearn, lament, reign supreme and fall: they comprise the gambit of Black’s work. There are hidden stories that are difficult to track. There are complex formulations of conventional structure that are undermined and subverted with every stroke of her brush. She says: “I enjoy experimenting with paint and imagine while I am painting that I am making a three-dimensional work, revealing all sides of an object on a flat surface. There are so many dichotomies in painting. It has an important history that is inseparable from its materiality and acknowledges the changes in its own history with a brutal honesty. Painting has a special way of giving an idea form, it opens up a different kind of space.”