“I’m more interested in painting what it is to be in your own body and experiencing the world and yourself through this outward looking that happens. So, the figures are a way of anchoring the viewer in this sense of physicality, weight or weightlessness, or ease or discomfort.”
—Christina Quarles
As a queer woman born to a black father and a white mother, Christina Quarles has developed a worldview defined by multiplicity. Often misrepresented as a white woman in life, Quarles creates work that confronts ideas of race, gender, and queerness. The highly expressive human forms of Quarles’s paintings hover between figuration and abstraction, paradoxically occupying both spaces at once. By incorporating the contradictions of identity into her painting, Quarles has developed an art form defined by energized formal inventiveness and semi-pictorial abstraction that has been likened to the early work of Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, breathing new life into the historical legacies of their work.
Quarles was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1985 and was raised in Los Angeles, California. She completed her BA at Hampshire College in 2007 and earned her MFA at Yale University in 2016. Today, Quarles lives and works in Los Angeles with her wife.
Bury Me in Cupertino (No, No, No, I Won’t Fergit to Put Roses on Yer Grave)
signed, titled and dated "Christina Quarles 2020 BURY ME IN CUPERTINO (NO, NO, NO, I WONT FERGIT TO PUT ROSES ON YER GRAVE)" on the reverse ink on paper 13 x 19 in. (33 x 48.3 cm) Executed in 2020.
