Christina Quarles is a contemporary American artist living and working in Los Angeles whose gestural, abstract paintings confront themes of racial and sexual identities, gender, and queerness.
The titles of her work often allude to a written and spoken vernacular. The content of her work features many distorted, often naked, human forms. She contorts and twists the bodies, making the limbs interact with different layers/dimensions of the artwork, to show a profusion of perspectives. In her personal life her racial and sexual identity of being a black, queer, cisgendered woman is often mistaken, so the multiplicity of her work is seen as a link to those personal experiences and qualms with misrepresentation. Quarles frequently depicts couples in erotic, if improbable poses. In 2018, she described her work as such: "As a woman, as somebody who's queer, as a person of color, it's important to me to not perpetuate the passive consumption of the body. But it's also what I love to do, paint the body. So I try to find ways to not allow for a passive reading. I see my work as exploring the ambiguity of identity. My figures I see as moving between genders. I do tend to have breasts in the work, but I see that more as an opportunity to have gravity expressed through this weird, fleshy, lumpy thing."
Career
Quarles had her first solo show entitled, "It's Gunna Be All Right, Cause Baby, There Ain't Nuthin Left," in 2017 at Skibum Macarthur in Los Angeles, CA, and her second entitled, "Baby, I Want Yew To Know All Tha Folks I Am," at the David Castillo Gallery in Miami, FL. Other notable exhibitions include "Fictions" at the Studio Museum in Harlem, "Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon" at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, and "Made in LA" at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, CA. In 2017, Peter Schjeldahl of the New Yorker equated Quarles' work to that of artists Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, describing her knack for "adapting abstract aesthetics to carnal representation." After Quarles' work was exhibited in "Abstract/Not Abstract" as part of Miami Art Week in 2017, art criticJeffrey Deitch stated he was "just stunned by her painting," later adding that he considers Quarles "the hottest artist in America right now."
Recognition
In 2015 Quarles received the Robert Schoelkopf Fellowship at Yale University and the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant in 2016. Quarles was also named a member of the "Artsy Vanguard," a group of 15 artists declared "On the Rise" by Artsy.net. Quarles is the recipient of the inaugural Pérez Prize from the Pérez Art Museum Miami.
