Edited by Grace Deveney. Text by Mark Godfrey, Uri McMillan.
In Quarles’ paintings, limbs, torsos and faces collide and merge with familiar domestic objects made strange through color and gesture
Los Angeles–based artist Christina Quarles (born 1985) paints bodies that are subjected not only to the weight and gravity of the physical world but also to the pleasures and pressures of the social realm. Her 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, whose art is often considered in relation to her identity as a queer, cisgender woman of mixed race, is among the vanguard of artists who are upending the white-male-dominated art scene. This book features paintings and drawings from throughout Quarles’ career. Working mostly in acrylic, Quarles populates her canvases with polymorphous figures that reference her background in life drawing, but with an expressionist spin all her own. Her figures’ disconnected arms and legs break through a surface punctuated with bold patterns, textures and staccato markings.
“Pour Over” (2019) is reproduced from Christina Quarles, published to accompany the exhibition currently on view at MCA Chicago. “Refusing to yield to tacit racial and gender epistemologies or taut ontological constructs, the bodily morphologies inherent in Christina Quarles’s paintings exert agile postures that defy the representational limits designed to contain them,” Uri McMillan writes. “Her painterly tableaux exhort us, in other words, to witness the profound potentiality of the polymorphous bodies straining at the edges of the frame, to see in that effort a freedom of representation. Fantastically excessive and radically abstract, gesticulating to their own internal rhythms, they occasion us to ask: What if we, too, were to embrace the full range of our contradictions, existing in perpetual flux and unapologetic multiplicity rather than in the fiction of singularity?”
FORMAT: Pbk, 7.5 x 10.75 in. / 112 pgs / 58 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $29.95 LIST PRICE: CANADA $39.95 GBP £23.99 ISBN: 9781636810324 PUBLISHER: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago AVAILABLE: 11/2/2021 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: Out of stock TERRITORY: WORLD
Published by Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Edited by Grace Deveney. Text by Mark Godfrey, Uri McMillan.
In Quarles’ paintings, limbs, torsos and faces collide and merge with familiar domestic objects made strange through color and gesture
Los Angeles–based artist Christina Quarles (born 1985) paints bodies that are subjected not only to the weight and gravity of the physical world but also to the pleasures and pressures of the social realm. Her 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, whose art is often considered in relation to her identity as a queer, cisgender woman of mixed race, is among the vanguard of artists who are upending the white-male-dominated art scene. This book features paintings and drawings from throughout Quarles’ career. Working mostly in acrylic, Quarles populates her canvases with polymorphous figures that reference her background in life drawing, but with an expressionist spin all her own. Her figures’ disconnected arms and legs break through a surface punctuated with bold patterns, textures and staccato markings.
