Christina Quarles

Artistic Profile

Style

Color Palette

Skin tones range from orangey-pink and yellow, to shades of blue and washy black. Facial features often lack detail or are obscured from view

Spatial Treatment

Deliberately ambiguous figures hemmed in by picture plane—pushing up against and surpassing limitation of frame. Planes of pattern and color intersect space, providing opportunity to dwell in more than one space at once

Figuration Approach

Highly expressive human forms hover between figuration and abstraction, paradoxically occupying both spaces at once

Visual Characteristics

Colorful, contorted bodies fill complex acrylic canvases which allude to multiplicity of identity. Combines emotive, gestural brushwork with solid, static fields

Evolution

Early Work

Earliest works honed in on bodily experience. At Yale worked on paper with gestural line making, later translating forms onto large canvases. Early canvases regularly included written phrases, puns, and patterns

Current Practice

Moved text from paintings into titles. Has engaged in more overtly political subject matter

Recent Developments

New suite of mesmerizing acrylic paintings on paper—a technique Quarles exhibits publicly for first time

Influences

Cultural

Titles reference vernacular language, overheard phrases, poetry and song lyrics

Technical

Connects with predecessors like Jack Whitten in avid experimentation and focus on transfiguring material terrain of canvas

Art Historical

Heavily influenced by David Hockney and Philip Guston among others

Visual Language

Pattern Use

Early canvases included written phrases, puns, and patterns that played with ambiguity and manipulated space, simultaneously anchoring and displacing figures

Text Integration

Quarles has moved text from paintings themselves into titles, further winnowing out predetermined visual narrative

Figural Treatment

Bodies in paintings—always entangled or embracing, often nude but multicolored—never feel whole, even when viewer can trace which limbs belong to which torso

Architectural Elements

Large-scale installations with trompe l'oeil renderings, floral patterns disrupted with what appear to be individual paintings stacked adjacent to one another

Themes and Subjects

Ambiguity

As Queer cis-woman born to black father and white mother, engages with world from multiply situated position. Project informed by daily experience with ambiguity and seeks to dismantle assumptions of fixed subjectivity

Core Themes

Work explores universal experience of existing within a body, as well as ways race, gender and sexuality intersect to form complex identities

Bodily Experience

Paints bodies subjected not only to weight and gravity of physical world but also to pleasures and pressures of social realm

Identity Politics

Refuses legible signifiers of subjectivity. A queer black woman whose fair skin often precludes her from being immediately categorized, she understands her own position in the world as unstable and transitory

Movements and Periods

Classification

Contemporary figurative abstraction; Queer figuration; Identity-based painting

Art Historical Context

Defined by energized formal inventiveness and semi-pictorial abstraction that has been likened to the early work of Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, breathing new life into historical legacies

Contemporary Positioning

Marc Payot: 'Christina's focus on synthesizing digital technology and traditional painterly techniques situates her unmistakably at the vanguard'

Techniques and Mediums

Scale

Monumental in scale, canvases raise haptic possibilities

Process

Begins with marks that evolve into line drawings. Photographs work and uses Adobe Illustrator to draw backgrounds. Creates digitally, then paints onto canvas using hand-made or vinyl-plotted stencils

Texture

Manipulates paint with energy of a sculptor. Acrylic is gouged and impastoed, built up into peaks and then stenciled away

Materiality

Intersecting color, texture, and layers, resulting works are more akin to relief sculpture than conventional painting

Primary Medium

Acrylic on canvas, ink on paper, works on paper