Artists website → https://www.christinaquarles.com/

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Christina Quarles (b. 1985, Chicago) lives and works in LA. In 2021 she joined the board of trustees of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. (Quarles 1)

“Quarles describes her work ‘as being portraits not of looking at a body, but portraits of being within your own body.’” (Hauser & Wirt, 2021)

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The bodies she paints are subjected not only to the weight and gravity of the physical world but also to the pleasures and pressures of the social realm. She combines ambiguous figures whose limbs, torsos, and faces merge with familiar domestic objects made strange through her colour choices and experimental painterly gestures.
She synthesizes digital technology and traditional painterly techniques as she generates aspects of her compositions with Adobe Illustrator where introducing digitally rendered patterns and markings that destabilize the sense of space in her paintings. (Hauser & Wirt, 2022; Quarles 2)

Her distorted and often disintegrated figures inhabit hybrid environments and reflect the fragmented experience we have of our own bodies and underscore the gaps that exist between our self-understanding and others’ perceptions. The subjects do not easily fit within the confines of the canvas or categories, and who commingle with each other in enigmatic ways. With her increasingly complicated groupings of figures, Christina Quarles demonstrates her sensitivity to the ways in which, through intimacy and in relationship, we come to know each other as messy and multifaceted selves. Ultimately, Quarles’s work explores the universal experience of existing within a body, as well as the ways race, gender, and sexuality intersect to form complex identities. (Quarles 2)