Christina Quarles, the multiracial queer painter transforming the art of the nude

by Victoria Woodcock

Isla del Rey, Menorca (CNN) — On the tiny Menorcan island of Isla del Rey, Christina Quarles is sitting under a canopy of olive trees. While birds chirp loudly overhead and the sea splashes at the shore a few feet away, the Los Angeles-based artist talks of her new exhibition with Hauser & Wirth Menorca — the Balearics outpost of the Swiss art gallery that also has locations from London to New York and Hong Kong, which opened in 2021.

“It’s just such a beautiful, serene place,” said Quarles of the island location, where buildings dating back to 1711 and an endemic subspecies of lizards cohabit with an outdoor sculpture trail and a pretty planting scheme by Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf. “Coming in on a boat is like a moment of meditation to prepare yourself to see art,” she added. “I feel like it slows down the process of looking.”

Inside the gallery space — a once-crumbling and dilapidated outbuilding — Quarles’ new body of work is both instantly arresting and continuously intriguing. Her vibrant paintings center curiously contorted figures — technicolor tangles of limbs, which tussle across large-scale canvases, pushing the boundaries of figurative art while addressing issues of identity, race, gender and sexuality.

“The exterior of the figure is a foil for talking about the interiority of a figure, about being within your body, and moving through the world — about what it is to find yourself in spaces and situations where your sense of self is constantly in flux,” said Quarles. “I am really interested in playing with the limits of representation.”

Quarles, 38, was born in Chicago and raised by her mother in Los Angeles, where she now lives with her wife and their one-year-old daughter. As “somebody that identifies as a cis woman, as a queer person, as multiracial,” she was initially drawn to art as a child as a way of “figuring out my sense of identity — specifically with race,” Quarles said. “My dad is Black and my mom is White, and as a kid this was met with a lot of resistance; usually I move through the world as somebody that is seen as White.”

Exploring the “simultaneity and contradiction” of her own identity, and challenging “fixed givens, whether its gender, race, sexual orientation, class,” has become the crux of Quarles’ practice. In her 2023 painting “Cherry Moon (Just As Tha Darkness Got Very Dark),” for example, figurative forms are pressed one on top of the other, morphing together. Some elements are shadowy and indistinct while others are in sharp focus, representing, Quarles explained, “an individual figure moving through time and space, interacting with a sense of the self, or a memory of the self, or a projection of the self.”

An early education

Her visual language began to take shape at the age of 12. “I was put into an adults’ drawing class that had live nude models,” she recalled. “I thought, ‘I must draw the nude,’ because that’s what all the classical painters of art history did, and I was very determined to be a serious artist.”

Today, life drawing continues to underpin Quarles’ paintings — she brings her “muscle memory of drawing a figure” to spontaneous compositions — which have achieved major, international recognition. Six of her pieces were included within the “Milk of Dreams” exhibition at the prestigious Venice Biennale last year; less than a month later, when Sotheby’s New York auctioned her painting “Night Fell Upon Us Up On Us” with an estimate of $600,000-$800,000, it sold for more than $4.5 million.

“She’s on a roll, and she has every reason to be,” Sam Bardaouil told CNN in a phone call. Bardaouil is co-director of the Hamburger Bahnhof contemporary art museum in Berlin, where another of Quarles’ solo shows, “Collapsed Time,” is running until September 17. “There’s something very refreshing about looking at Christina’s paintings,” he said. “They’re quite dazzling. Standing in front of these bodies is a very exuberant experience — emotionally, psychologically and even physically.”

Experimental techniques

In Quarles’ complex and compelling compositions, paint is scraped and combed; it pools and drips, sometimes using traditional techniques, other times “inspired by TikTok videos of nail art or how to decorate a cake,” she explained. She doesn’t make any preliminary sketches: “I just go in gesturally; it’s a very physical process.” Once the figures are in place, the process becomes more controlled. Quarles, who worked previously as a graphic designer, uses Adobe Illustrator to plot out planes of color, sections of pattern and architectural elements, which are then hand-applied to the canvas via vinyl stencils.

“She uses very experimental and new techniques, and all the details, textures and colours that you see in Christina’s paintings are also part of her life,” said Mar Rescalvo Pons, director of Hauser & Wirth Menorca, highlighting the “three different languages” Quarles has used in the show — line drawings, large canvases and smaller paintings on paper.

Quarles’ sure-footed line drawings are also small in scale, and black and white. They function as “notations of what I’m thinking about and what’s around me,” said Quarles, who often also incorporates snippets of text — “things that I’ve overheard, whether it’s advertisements or song lyrics.” The paintings on paper, meanwhile, are a new medium: again colorful, and suggestive of physical intimacy. “A repeated, sort-of tumble is happening,” explained Quarles of the pieces in the Hauser & Wirth show; its title, “Come In From An Endless Place,” referring to its island location, but also an ongoing struggle. “The idea of intimacy comes up a lot in my practice, as something that could be pleasurable or desired, but also existing in moments of struggle, violence or sickness.”

Motherhood, too, has impacted Quarles’ work, reinforcing her thoughts and experiences of “multiple and oftentimes contradictory identity positions,” she said. “I am a mother, but I didn’t carry and give birth to our child. I have an autonomy that is oftentimes afforded to men in our culture, while my wife has gone through all the traditionally female roles of motherhood.”

Quarles likens her studio painting practice to looking after a young child. “It’s very time consuming, and the wonderful, transformative moments co-exist with monotony and boredom,” she laughed. “Some days in the studio I’m just dirty and cold and physically tired, but you know that there’s also a bigger purpose to it, which can be very moving and powerful. I’ve found it to be a very beautiful parallel.”

“With Christina, it’s difficult to separate the artist from the work,” said Bardaouil. “The body as a construct of identity politics is currently being revisited in contemporary painting, but Christina has arrived at a very distinct position that is very distinguished and truly her own.”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2023 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.