These artworks express the disorientating experience of ‘being in a body’

The vibrant, enticing universe of Christina Quarles’ artwork is inhabited by impossible configurations of polymorphous bodies and multiple iterations of faces and limbs. How many figures are unfurling here? What is this torso transforming into there? To whom do all these feet belong? 

Following her participation in last year’s celebrated exhibition The Milk of Dreams at the Venice Biennale, the Los Angeles-based artist’s latest show Come In From an Endless Place (at Hauser & Wirth Menorca) elaborates on her fascination with the experience of embodiment and all the joy, trouble, pleasure and precarity integral to living inside a body. “I see this work as being portraiture – not portraiture of looking at a body, but of being in your body and moving through the world,” she explains. “And what it is to find yourself in spaces and situations where your sense of self is in flux and you have to fit into surroundings – whether they’re social or architectural – that are sometimes made for you to move easily within and are sometimes not at all created with you in mind, therefore you become hyper-aware of moving through the world in that particular body.”

As a queer, cis-gendered woman born to a Black father and a white mother, Quarles’ self-described “multiply-situated” experience of embodiment manifests itself throughout the exhibition. In a tour of the gallery, Quarles tells Dazed, “For me, the issues of what it is to be in a gendered body, a queer body, racialised body – and when I say ‘racialised body’ I don’t just mean not white, we all live in racialised bodies – is less about what it is to look at the markers of those aspects of yourself, it’s more about what it is to be contained by a frame, contained by boundary.”

The slippage between how we experience our interiority, how we perceive our outward identity and we are perceived by others also informs Quarles’ ongoing investigation. The origins of this curiosity lay primarily in some of the formative experiences of childhood. She recalls, “I usually move through the world as somebody who’s seen as white. I remember when I was a kid, especially in Los Angeles where there are so many people from different parts of the world, people would ask, ‘So where are your folks from?’ And when I told them that my dad is Black and my mum was white, people would say, ‘You’re not Black, you’re white.’ And so, even before I was able to think about this in a more adult, refined way, I was wondering as a kid why it was that how I saw myself was met with resistance when I asserted it.” 

“Even before I was able to think about this in a more adult, refined way, I was wondering as a kid why it was that how I saw myself was met with resistance when I asserted it” – Christina Quarles

Moving through the exhibition space, which features paintings on canvas and paper alongside a series of drawings, Quarles elaborates on how these early experiences contributed to her desire to forge a way of explicating the complexity of these encounters and discontinuities, and the abundant configurations of identities we can carry within and without; to visually represent and explore how this very abundance is so often at odds with the rigid, reductive categories into which we are so often pigeonholed against our will. “That led to an ongoing openness to aspects of ourselves that are taken for granted, whether it’s gender, race, or sexual orientation, nationality or class… these things that we have come to think of as fixed givens but actually there’s a lot of movement within them. And so, trying to arrive at a way of describing that experience that felt really true to that experience, I also felt like it was important for us to not use only visual markers. I wanted to use the visual language to describe that location, so the hope is that the work can reach a multitude of experiences.”

This sense of disorientation and multiplicity is amplified as painterly gestures in the foreground contrast with op-art moments of digitally-rendered graphic precision in the background, confounding our perception of perspective and space. The build-up of paint in places – often in the backgrounds  – is part of what makes the work so complex and even sculptural, at times projecting from the surface of the canvas and forcing figures on the closest plane of the picture to recede into the distance.

“Even if you’re in one of the least talked about identity positions, I think you still have moments where you find yourself exceeding or falling short of the expectation of who you are in the world and the part you’re expected to play” – Christina Quarles

“I don’t start off with any sketches, I just go into it gesturally,” says Quarles, reflecting on her practice. “It’s a very gestural process that comes from a long-standing personal history of working with life models. I see this as a physical exercise so that, when I come to the canvas, it’s really just me interacting with the gestural mark-making.” As the painting develops and figures start to emerge, she then photographs the work and begins to bring in digital elements into the process. “I used to be a graphic designer for many years and so I’m very proficient in Adobe Illustrator,” she says, “It’s something that I can really play around with and it allows for me to experiment with the planes and environment or architectural elements that interact with the figures are going to be without actually figuring it out on the canvas.” 

While her work is such a deeply subjective expression of Quarles’ own selfhood, the expression transcends the specificity of her particular experience. We have all felt, at some point, in contention with the expectations and labels placed upon us. “I think that there’s a lot of potential for connection with this idea,” she says, “Even if you’re in one of the least talked about identity positions, I think you still have moments where you find yourself exceeding or falling short of the expectation of who you are in the world and the part you’re expected to play. And so I’m always trying to find, through the specificity of my own experience, a place that reaches a sort of kernel. The more I talk to people, it seems a lot of people have this experience.”

Christina Quarles’ Come In From An Endless Place is running at Hauser & Wirth in Menorca until October 29, 2023.

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