CHRISTINA QUARLES

Kinetic planes of color, texture and pattern evoke architectural and digital realms where human forms jolt and bend in response to unseen forces. Denser and more frenetic than Quarles’ earlier works, these paintings feel newly urgent while hewing to the artist’s core pursuit: to show how instability and resilience coexist, creating spaces where multiple realities can overlap.

Quarles approaches each canvas with no predetermined composition, beginning with improvisatory marks that evolve into fluid lines resembling human forms. By working in acrylic paint, she maintains the immediacy of drawing, building up layers and textures while suspending moments in time. Midway through a painting, Quarles shifts to a systematic stenciling process. She photographs the work and uses Adobe Illustrator to view her initial marks against various backdrops. The patterns and planes she creates digitally are printed on a vinyl plotter and used in a multi-layered masking process. This back-and-forth relationship between the computer and the canvas lays the groundwork for seemingly impossible scenarios.

Quarles plays with interiority and exteriority throughout the exhibition, folding domestic and cosmic spaces into one another and allowing daylight and moonlight to coexist within a single frame. By refusing any one definitive narrative or perspective, her paintings generate a preternatural simultaneity—one that evokes the disorientation of trauma and transition. This sense of instability is exemplified in ‘Glow, After’ (2026), the artist’s largest stretched painting to date, comprising two modular panels whose components are devised to rotate. Over the course of the exhibition, a series of reconfigurations will invite ongoing reinterpretation.

The exhibition will also debut a new series of five charcoal works on paper. Unlike acrylic paint, charcoal imposes tighter constraints. These new works are made through erasure rather than addition: forms emerge as the material is removed, with sections of paper carefully cut away and surfaces peeled back using an X-Acto knife.Because stenciling is so central to her practice—creating order through sharp edges and layered forms—Quarles developed a way to invert that process in charcoal.

The gallery windows have been covered in white film to heighten the contrast of exterior shadows, echoing the black-and-white gradients of drawings and the black pigment that has been sprayed onto the surface of theSouth Gallery columns—a reference to the blackened trees of Quarles’ former neighborhood. Like ash building up on a surface, the columns bear cumulative residue: layers of pigment that reveal imperfections and texture.Just as foreground and background oscillate within her canvases, so does the relationship between her work and the surrounding architecture.

As Quarles notes: ‘We aren’t fixed beings; we adapt to and are shaped by the environments and social structures we’re part of.’ In ‘The Ground Glows Black,’ this idea plays out as an ongoing exchange between the body, the built environment and our simultaneous, subjective realities—a nexus where meaning emerges from context, movement and change rather than from a single, fixed position.

Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.