An Artist Whose Language Is Painting (2024)

Growing up in Los Angeles as the fair-skinned daughter of a Black father and a white mother, Christina Quarles, 38, can recall the first time her sense of identity was challenged: “In elementary school, there was this book of famous Black people throughout history and my nana was in there,” she said. (Her paternal grandmother, Norma Quarles, was one of the first Black TV journalists.) “I would show the other kids that was my grandmother in the book but get told, ‘No, you’re not Black.’ It was this disconnect between how I was raised with my own personal sense of my biography, and then to be met with such resistance when I would express that to people.”

This sense of fragmentation animates her paintings, which can make an encounter with them a disorienting, albeit seductive experience. On her canvases, polymorphous, shape-shifting figures collide and intertwine; heads multiply; limbs get entangled with each other. A graduate of the fine art program at Yale that has produced some of the new vanguard in Black figuration like Tschabalala Self and Jordan Casteel, Quarles’s paintings explode the very idea of figurative painting into something more abstract, exploring how race, gender and sexuality intersect and what it means to live within a body. Working from memory and without a plan, Quarles paints in gestural brushstrokes directly onto the canvas, responding to, as she puts it, “this interplay between physical mark making and the process of looking and imagining what the next step could be, as well as a number of factors that I can’t control or anticipate.” Then she photographs the work and imports it to Adobe Illustrator — she had a brief stint as a graphic designer after completing her undergraduate degree — where she cuts up and warps the image. Then using vinyl stencils, she applies the digital patterns onto the canvas. For her, using Illustrator is “a way of bringing a sketching process halfway through the painting” and a means to direct and focus the composition of the work. It’s this tension between the digital and the analogue, the way her figures oscillate between ecstasy and pain, confinement and freedom that gives her work its power.

Quarles has had a whirlwind couple of years: She had her largest solo institutional show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2021, she debuted at the Venice Biennale in April last year and the following month a 2019 painting by her sold for a record $4.5 million at Sotheby’s. After a show at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin earlier this year, Quarles debuted a new body of work titled “Come In From an Endless Place” at Hauser & Wirth’s Minorca outpost in June. The new show will feature large canvas paintings, fine-line drawings and in a first for Quarles, paintings on paper.