Christina Quarles

Christina Quarles’ figurative paintings of fractured, entangled bodies explore identity and the gendered and racialized body. Her works frustrate attempts to construct a definitive sense of bodily cohesion through the seeming inclusion of multiple perspectives at once. At times, Quarles paints her figures bent over themselves, contorted, and seemingly observing their own distended bodies. Limbs and torsos proliferate and become unwieldy, vibrant bursts of color, passing through patterned, graphic panels that Quarles inserts into her canvas through computer-generated interventions and laser-printed vinyl stickers. Quarles’ paintings suggest the impossibility of self-perception and the fragmentation of identity in changing social contexts. (Recipient of the Pérez Prize awarded by the Pérez Art Museum, Miami in 2019)