Karla Black on Barry Le Va

Artist Karla Black in conversation with Fruitmarket Director, Fiona Bradley, discussing how Barry Le Va’s work inspires and informs her approach to materials and continues to have relevance for artists working today. This conversation, recorded in January 2025, accompanied the Fruitmarket show Barry Le Va: In a State of Flux, the first-ever major exhibition in the UK of the work of ground-breaking American artist and the first comprehensive museum exhibition anywhere since his death in 2021.

The work of Le Va has long been a touchstone for Black. Sharing a use of fragmented and scattered materials, including powders – chalk and flour for Le Va; plaster dust, pigment and soil for Black – both artists make predominantly floor-based work that explores the transient nature of materials. Both practices rail against the apparent permanence of traditional sculpture, revealing, as Black puts it ‘that material in this world is only ever either flying together or flying apart and it’s only the limited experience we as human beings can have of time that leads us to believe that an object is permanent.’ Similarly, Le Va sought ‘to eliminate sculpture as a finished, totally resolved object’ and maintain its potential energy in a state of flux.

A video of this conversation is available on Fruitmarket’s YouTube.

Further details about In a State of Flux, including images and video, can be found at the Fruitmarket online archive, where you can also see more about Karla Black’s 2021 exhibition sculptures (2001–2021) details for a retrospective.

The books on Barry Le Va and Karla Black that accompanied each exhibition are available to buy from Fruitmarket’s online bookshop.

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