The colourful, enticing universe of Christina Quarles’ artwork is inhabited by not possible configurations of polymorphous bodies and multiple iterations of faces and limbs. What number of figures are unfurling here? What is that this torso transforming into there? To whom do all these feet belong? 

Following her participation in last yr’s celebrated exhibition The Milk of Dreams on the Venice Biennale, the Los Angeles-based artist’s latest show Come In From an Infinite Place (at Hauser & Wirth Menorca) elaborates on her fascination with the experience of embodiment and all the enjoyment, trouble, pleasure and precarity integral to living inside a body. “I see this work as being portraiture – not portraiture of a body, but of being in your body and moving through the world,” she explains. “And what it’s to search out yourself in spaces and situations where your sense of self is in flux and you will have to suit into surroundings – whether or not they’re social or architectural – which are sometimes made so that you can move easily inside and are sometimes in no way created with you in mind, subsequently you grow to be hyper-aware of moving through the world in that specific 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 problems of what it’s to be in a gendered body, a queer body, racialised body – and once I say ‘racialised body’ I don’t just mean not white, we all live in racialised bodies – is less about what it’s to take a look at the markers of those facets of yourself, it’s more about what it’s 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’re perceived by others also informs Quarles’ ongoing investigation. The origins of this curiosity lay primarily in among the formative experiences of childhood. She recalls, “I often move through the world as any individual who’s seen as white. I remember once I was a child, especially in Los Angeles where there are such a lot of people from different parts of the world, people would ask, ‘So where are your folks from?’ And once 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 used to be capable of take into consideration this in a more adult, refined way, I used to be wondering as a child why it was that how I saw myself was met with resistance once I asserted it.” 

“Even before I used to be capable of take into consideration this in a more adult, refined way, I used to be wondering as a child why it was that how I saw myself was met with resistance once 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 those encounters and discontinuities, and the abundant configurations of identities we will carry inside and without; to visually represent and explore how this very abundance is so often at odds with the rigid, reductive categories into which we’re so often pigeonholed against our will. “That led to an ongoing openness to facets of ourselves which are taken with no consideration, whether it’s gender, race, or sexual orientation, nationality or class… this stuff that we’ve come to consider as fixed givens but actually there’s plenty of movement inside them. And so, attempting to arrive at a way of describing that have that felt really true to that have, I also felt prefer it was essential for us to not use only visual markers. I wanted to make use of the visual language to explain that location, so the hope is that the work can reach a large number of experiences.”

This sense of disorientation and multiplicity is amplified as painterly gestures within the foreground contrast with op-art moments of digitally-rendered graphic precision within the background, confounding our perception of perspective and space. The build-up of paint in places – often within the backgrounds  – is a component 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 image to recede into the gap.

“Even in the event you’re in one in all the least talked about identity positions, I believe you continue to have moments where you end up exceeding or falling wanting the expectation of who you might be on the earth 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 really gestural process that comes from a long-standing personal history of working with life models. I see this as a physical exertion in order that, once I come to the canvas, it’s really just me interacting with the gestural mark-making.” Because the painting develops and figures begin to emerge, she then photographs the work and begins to usher in digital elements into the method. “I was a graphic designer for a few years and so I’m very proficient in Adobe Illustrator,” she says, “It’s something that I can really mess 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. Now we have all felt, in some unspecified time in the future, in contention with the expectations and labels placed upon us. “I believe that there’s plenty of potential for reference to this concept,” she says, “Even in the event you’re in one in all the least talked about identity positions, I believe you continue to have moments where you end up exceeding or falling wanting the expectation of who you might be on the earth and the part you’re expected to play. And so I’m at all times trying to search out, through the specificity of my very own experience, a spot that reaches a type of kernel. The more I check with people, it seems plenty of people have this experience.”

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

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