Christina Quarles

Known to fill her canvases with entwining bodies and limbs, Christina Quarles draws upon her own experience as a queer, multiracial woman to create polymorphous paintings that explore sensual, shifting states of identity. Born in 1985 in Chicago, Illinois, Quarles moved to Los Angeles in 1991 following her parents’ divorce, where she still lives and works.

Quarles received her BA on philosophy and critical race theory from Hampshire College in 2007. From there she found language a limiting way to approach thinking about identity and returned to making art, eventually earning an MA in painting from Yale School of Art in 2016. Her education at these prestigious institutions honed her skills and deepened her engagement with critical theory and art history, both of which inform her work. Quarles' paintings often draw from a wide range of influences, including Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and contemporary digital aesthetics.

With its inherently liquid physicality, paint is a fluent vehicle for her expression of forms of bodily and social experience. Painting as a conceptual and historical framework provides a structure of unspoken norms and fixed ideas against which Quarles’ bodies, with their athletic, shapeshifting freedom of motion, can rebel. Quarles begins her works freehand, improvising from these initial brushstrokes to build the composition into being. These textures might also be seen to echo the alternately muscular and vaporous bodies in Francis Bacon’s paintings, which were similarly born of brushwork both intuitive and controlled.

Her work has received rising acclaim. Quarles was prominently featured in the 2020 Whitechapel Gallery group show Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium, and the following year held solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the South London Gallery. Her works are held in major museum collections worldwide, including the Tate in London, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles, among others.