Art review: Karla Black | Gregor Wright: Out of Space, Out of Time

Karla Black’s name is ubiquitous on lists of “names to look out for in 2009″. The Glasgow-based artist’s reputation has been growing steadily, and this year she will have major solo shows at Migros Museum, Zurich, Modern Art Oxford and Edinburgh’s Inverleith House (in November). This show of new work at Mary Mary is, perhaps, the curtain-raiser.

Black is a sculptor. She is quite insistent on this point, even though her works sometimes hang on walls like paintings, or transform entire spaces like installations. She works with materials such as paper and plastic daubed with moisturiser, hair gel, fake tan – even, occasionally, paint, in a palette of pale, ethereal colours. The works respond to the space they are in and usually last no longer than the course of the exhibition.

Body moisturiser may be the single biggest component in this show. Climbing the stairs to Mary Mary, you catch the sweet, cloying smell of it. In Surplus is a Given, the largest work here, it is smeared on the floor and used to create patterns of uniform lines, occasionally dotted with cream of a different colour, paint or petroleum jelly. It’s impossible to look at this work and not imagine the process of making it, the tactile messiness of it.

Black started out making performance work, though more recently she has removed her own presence, she says, to allow a more direct relationship between work and viewer. Yet there remains a sense in her work that we are witnessing the aftermath of a performance, albeit an intensely private one.

In other works here she uses cotton wool, toilet paper, plastic and Sellotape. The latter is transformed in Contact isn’t Lost: strips of clear tape are suspended floor-to-ceiling, then made shimmeringly visible by smudges of chalk dust. The final work in the show, Strength is an End, is the most fragile and the most ethereal. Small piles of chalk dust have been deposited on the floor and gradually smeared by footprints, or just by the passage of air. It is barely even mark-making, more the suggestion of the possibility of a mark, yet there is a deftness about it.

Black distances herself from gender-based interpretations of her work, pointing out, rightly, that these are only ever applied to women. But she distances herself from other interpretations too. All she gives us by way of guidance here is a quote from Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves about distrusting the “neat designs of life that are drawn upon half-sheets of notepaper”.

So she is striving for complexity, not clarity. But art is about communication, and this is where many young artists fall down. Black does not. Her work has a confidence which tells us she has plenty to say, even if she prefers not to say it directly.

A handful of streets away, at the Modern Institute, is another artist whose star is in the ascendant: Gregor Wright, a near contemporary of Black’s, who also trained at Glasgow School of Art. Wright is primarily known as a painter, although he also makes sculpture and exhibits groups of drawings.

His work is unresolved and spontaneous. His paintings hover between pure abstraction and part representation. If one element in a painting suggests a scale or perspective, another undermines it and flattens everything into shape and colour. But there is a sense of vigour in the way the paint is applied, a revelling in the materials for their own sake.

He too supplies us with a guiding quote: “Things only really become interesting when they start to stop making sense.” So there’s no point in trying to crack these works as if they have a code. They are deliberately disordered because he wants us as viewers to find our own order in them, and see what that tells us about ourselves.

The sculptural work in the show, Decomposition, is cleverly named. It looks as though it’s in a state of disintegration, with its fragments of wood and precarious balancing pieces. Yet it is not an anxious piece of work – liberally populated with coloured dice, it is bold, even anarchic. It is a kind of composition in reverse, challenging the kinds of ideas much art takes for granted.

Finally, we come to a room of drawings – 85 of them, presented in neat rows. Some are little more than a handful of marks, others include recognisable, even recurring forms. Made with crayons, they are confident and slapdash, playful and vigorous. They don’t suddenly make Wright’s work easy to understand, but they do tell us much about the spirit in which it is made.