Karla Black was born in Alexandria, Scotland, in 1972. She lives and works in Glasgow.

Black creates abstract sculptures using a combination of everyday materials including powder, soap, gels, and pastes, along with more traditional media such as plaster, chalk, paint, and paper. Carefully arranged on the floor or suspended from the ceiling, they are typically realized on site and include direct evidence of the process of their creation through fingerprints and dust. Delicate, messy, sensuous, and visceral, they testify to a physical experience of the world that lies beyond metaphorical and symbolic references. Poised between form and anti-form, they emerge like transitional states or naturally occurring sediments. In particular, Black regards language as a secondary framework to the deeply material, affective experience that her sculptures evoke, with a fascination for the psychological implications of mess and chaos. Her simultaneously delicate and monumental works are encountered as both sculpture and site, an approach that enables her audience to engage with the materials differently and encourages new ways of looking at the spaces they activate.

Among the prominent institutions that presented her work: Des Moines Art Centre, Des Moines (2020); Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2019); The Power Plant, Toronto (2018); Beaux-Arts de Paris and Musée des Archives Nationales, Paris, as part of the Festival d'Automne à Paris (2017); National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh (2016); IMMA, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2015); Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (2014); Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Gemeentemuseum, The Hague (2013); Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin; Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow (2012); 54th Venice Art Biennale (2011); Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Nuremberg, Germany (2010); Modern Art Oxford, Oxford; Kunstverein Hamburg, Hamburg and Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2009).

In 2011, the artist represented Scotland at the 54th Venice Biennale and was nominated for the Turner Prize.