CHRISTINA QUARLES

Known for the fragmented and polymorphous bodies that animate her critically acclaimed canvases, Quarles’s fascination with expressing corporeality and its many complexities first took hold in a figure drawing class when she was twelve years old. Since then, she has pursued the subject of the body, developing an introspective and innovative painting practice rooted in drawing. Quarles continues to attend life drawing classes whenever possible and did so most recently during her residency in Somerset. This approach to regularly observing different types of bodies anew while honing her skills has enabled the artist to push past the limits of anatomical legibility. Visualising what it feels like to live within a body while grappling with an excess of identities, she approaches the canvas with no predetermined composition, letting entangled arms and legs emerge spontaneously from memory, imagination, and improvisation.

The exhibition’s title, In 24 Days tha Sun’ll Set at 7pm, refers to the time frame in which Quarles produced these paintings. Spanning the early months of 2022 through the final weeks of Summer, this body of work reflects the artist’s waxing and waning optimism across a tumultuous and transformative year. Much like the days whose light increases and decreases on either side of the seasons, the year began with growing potential for communal healing and social upheaval, yet it seems to be ending on a more tentative note.

These contemplations manifest in the scale of Quarles’s new paintings, particularly works like Same Shit, Diff’rent Day. Here figures contract, slouch, and transform with varying precarity across patterns and planes whose legibility shifts in space. Likewise, ‘A Song For YOu’ broaches physical scale with gestures that are fixed by the limits of Quarles’s reach. Brilliant brushwork and an abundance of colours and textures expand her gestural line drawings as different painting techniques move across multiple figures in a single work. Vibrant magentas, blues, greens, and yellows serve not as a means of describing reality but as a way of actively resisting the viewer’s instinct to assign binary classifications like male or female, white or black, abstract or representational, to the figures. An array of recognisable patterns—from a jewel-toned, cloud-filled sky to a floral tapestry—contain and divide Quarles’s painted forms, reflecting her own feelings about living in a body that resists simple or immediate classification.

The artist has said that ‘the contradiction of my Black ancestry coupled with my fair skin results in my place always being my displace. Throughout my paintings, there are perspectival planes that both situate and fragment the bodies they bisect—location becomes dislocation. Fixed categories of identity can be used to marginalise but, paradoxically, can be used by the marginalised to gain visibility and political power. This paradox is the central focus of my practice.’ Constrained only by the boundaries of the canvas and the painted patterns within that physical frame, the figures in Quarles’s new paintings straddle interior and exterior worlds. A visual analogy for the push and pull between our public and private selves and inner and outer voices, the work calls attention to society’s constructs around identity, and the potential for excess and expanse where limitations were once prescribed.