American painter Christina Quarles is blurring the boundaries between gender, sex, and race.

Cover photo: Bad Air/Yer Grievances, (presumably) acrylic on canvas, by Christina Quarles (2018). Via Interview Magazine.

This article is part of my 30 Living Queer Artists Worth Celebrating in 2019 series. June is Pride Month, commemorating the international gay rights movement that began June 28th, 1969, with the Stonewall riots of New York. 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the event. I’m celebrating all month long!

WARNING: The following article features and/or discusses graphic nudity and homoeroticism.

Christina Quarles

Los Angeles based Christina Quarles paints amorphous gestural figures, in abstract settings. The erotic images capture women in intimate positions. The nude characters — often but not always — appear in visions of ecstasy, with busy hands, twisted limbs, and open mouths.

Quarles’ paintings are nearly indecipherable. The canvases include floating hands and odd amounts of legs. “I tend to paint boobs a lot,” Quarles laughs. The number of figures is impossible to determine. This dynamism adds an intense sense of motion.

Quarles’ art functions in a variety of traditions. The ambiguity of time and space draws from cubism and the gestural automatism and abstraction pulls from surrealism. The acidic hues are reminiscent of psychedelia. Quarles brilliantly combines all these aesthetics with a contemporary view of the human body.

Identity & Boundary

When Christina Quarles was born in Chicago in 1985 to a mixed-race family, her parents could only assign her one race on her birth certificate. The idea of demarcation has followed Quarles throughout her life. She says, “As a Queer, cis-woman, born to a black father and a white mother, I engage with the world from a position that is multiply situated.”

“My experience with race was really more of a gateway into a larger understanding of these boundaries and how they could be applied to different aspects of life,” Quarles explains.

She writes, “Fixed categories of identity can be used to marginalize but, paradoxically, can be used by the marginalized to gain visibility and political power. This paradox is the central focus of my practice.” Quarles’ art asks the viewer, “is identity important?” and “who determines identity?”

Ambiguity

“From a theoretical point of view, the state of ambiguity is very appealing because it refuses ideas of essentialism or the binary, all of those boogeymen of today. I think in reality it is quite intolerable to exist in an ambiguous state for very long because there is an undercurrent of wanting to be in a community. That’s the compromise that is interesting to me,” Quarles notes.

As androgyny becomes more popular, it’s likely that American culture will continue to blur the societal boundaries of male and female. In this regard, Quarles is reminiscent of gender-fluid artist Nicole Eisenman. Of course, as a mixed-race artist, Quarles is also challenging the ideas of black versus white. Many of her characters are painted in grey tones. Quarles’ work is ultimately a statement about prejudice.

Quarles explains, “I often see [the figures] as being definitively one person or as being more of a movement like one or more people moving through time and space. Often if you were to add up the amount of torsos or legs or hands, it doesn’t quite ever add up to a definitive number of people. There’s always a little more or a little less of one body part. Even if it is with two bodies, I’ll see it as being an interaction with shadow or reflection. That’s the way that I see it. It’s interesting the amount of work the viewer will do to connect the dots, which I find really interesting in relation to my own daily experience and the body that I was born into. I’ll often find that people will ignore certain very present facts just to come to a more comfortable conclusion about who I am.”

She concludes, “One of the things I find most powerful about art is its potential to position people in a conversation they did not know was theirs to explore. I hope to make paintings that are a refuge for those of us who experience ambiguity on a daily basis and as a means to unlock the potential for ambiguity within those who have never had cause to question their own identity position.”

Canvas as Body

Historically, art has been a representation of the powerful, painted by male artists for wealthy nobles, kings, and popes. Art has become increasingly democratized over the last few centuries. The art world now reflects different types of artists and ideas. Quarles investigates the similarities between the corporeality of the body and the canvas, which — at least in Western society — have long favored white men.

“Yeah, my work is interested in playing with the expectations of painting and the history of painting and pointing to the materiality of painting itself as a way to parallel the experience of living in a body. So, I’m really interested in how both painting and identity try so hard to exist without a history, or to exist as an essentialized given, but actually are very much formed by a social history and rules that we construct around how they’re read,” Quarles admits.

She continues, “And so I’m interested in playing with the invisibility of painting as a medium and the invisibility of who gets to make the rules of what is legible in painting history and really bringing that back to the surface or to the forefront. People will often be like, “Art is so subjective and it just exists in this world of genius and it’s either good or it’s bad .” But really, that’s not the case at all. It’s especially not the case if you go to some place like Yale. It’s just a language like any other language: It has rules, and those rules are not based in any sort of higher power, they’re actually based on human history, and usually that history has been dictated by largely straight, white, Western men. So, I’m interested in playing with that history and making the viewer aware of it by making clear: This is a painting and it is flat and it exists in the confines of itself.”

A New Era

Museum and gallery curators — prompted by the public at large — have finally developed an interest in representing a diverse array of artists, including those who are challenging traditional notions of sex, identity, and the human body.

“I think it’s an exciting time to be exploring these things, because people and institutions are more responsive to having these conversations that I think a lot of people have been having their whole lives. But now, it’s this moment where people are actually wanting to hear what other voices and other identities have to say about their own story,” Quarles explains.

In March of this year, Quarles was awarded $50,000 as part of the inaugural Pérez Prize established by Miami collectors Darlene and Jorge M. Pérez. There has certainly been a shift in the art world in just the last ten years. I’m certainly excited to see where artists will lead us. To keep up with Christina Quarles, follow her on Instagram.