Christina Quarles

Christina Quarles (born 1985) 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.

Christina Quarles
Born1985
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
NationalityAmerican
EducationYale School of Art
Known forPainting

Early life

Quarles was born in 1985 in Chicago, Illinois.

In 1991 she moved with her mother to Los Angeles, California where she continues to live and work.[1]

Education

After attending the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts (LACHSA), Quarles earned a BA in art and philosophy from Hampshire College in 2007,[2] and later an MFA in Painting from the Yale School of Art in 2016. In the same year, Quarles also completed a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.[1]

Work

The titles of her work often allude to a written and spoken vernacular.[3] 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.[4][5] Quarles frequently depicts couples in erotic, if improbable poses.[6][7]

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."[8]

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,[9] and her second entitled, "Baby, I Want Yew To Know All Tha Folks I Am," at the David Castillo Gallery in Miami, FL.[10][11] 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.[9]

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."[12] After Quarles' work was exhibited in "Abstract/Not Abstract" as part of Miami Art Week in 2017, art critic Jeffrey Deitch stated he was "just stunned by her painting,"[12] later adding that he considers Quarles "the hottest artist in America right now."[13]

Recognition

In 2015 Quarles received the Robert Schoelkopf Fellowship at Yale University and the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant in 2016.[14] Quarles was also named a member of the "Artsy Vanguard," a group of 15 artists declared "On the Rise" by Artsy.net.[15] Quarles is the recipient of the inaugural Pérez Prize from the Pérez Art Museum Miami.[16]

References
  1. "Christina Quarles - Artists - Regen Projects". www.regenprojects.com. Retrieved 2018-08-16.
  2. "Christina Quarles". Flaunt Magazine. Retrieved 2018-08-17.
  3. "Christina Quarles at David Castillo Gallery". www.artforum.com. Retrieved 2018-08-17.
  4. "Christina Quarles - 11 Artworks, Bio & Shows on Artsy". www.artsy.net. Retrieved 2018-11-27.
  5. "Christina Quarles - Hammer Museum". The Hammer Museum. Retrieved 2018-11-27.
  6. Knight, Christopher. "'Made in L.A. 2018': Why the Hammer biennial is the right show for disturbing times". latimes.com. Retrieved 2018-08-17.
  7. "Christina Quarles - Art in America". Art in America. Retrieved 2018-08-17.
  8. Slenske, Michael (April 16, 2018). ""Who's Afraid of the Female Nude? Paintings of Naked Women, Usually by Clothed Men, Are Suddenly Sitting Very Uncomfortably on Gallery Walls"". The Cut (New York Magazine).
  9. "Quarles, Christina | 14 Exhibitions and Events". www.mutualart.com. Retrieved 2018-08-16.
  10. Vogel, Wendy (March 2018). "Christina Quarles: David Castillo". Art in America. 106: 110–111 – via Academic Search Primer.
  11. "Baby, I Want Yew To Know All Tha Folks I Am - David Castillo". davidcastillogallery.com. Retrieved 2018-08-16.
  12. "Larry Gagosian and Jeffrey Deitch Celebrate Abstraction With an Art Basel Group Show Extravaganza | artnet News". artnet News. 2017-12-06. Retrieved 2018-08-16.
  13. "Jeffrey Deitch and Gagosian Team Up to Defeat Zombie Formalism". Garage. 2017-12-06. Retrieved 2018-08-16.
  14. "Christina Quarles - Los Angeles Review of Books". Los Angeles Review of Books. Retrieved 2018-08-16.
  15. "15 Artists on the Rise in 2018". Artsy. 2018-04-30. Retrieved 2018-08-16.
  16. Durón, Maximilíano (2019-03-08). "Christina Quarles Wins Inaugural $50,000 Pérez Prize from PAMM". ARTnews. Retrieved 2019-03-09.
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