LOS ANGELES—Regen Projects just announced representation of Christina Quarles.
Quarles’ paintings teeter on the edge of representation and ambiguity. Informed by her experience as a Queer, cisgender woman of mixed race, her art explores how fixed categories of identity can be used to both marginalize and empower an individual or group. Combining diverse pictorial techniques with vibrant colors, textures, and patterns, her engaging canvases are peopled with fractured, contorting bodies that simultaneously represent figures without being bound to conventional signifiers of race or gender. Oftentimes the picture plane is punctuated with signs of the domestic in the form of a flower dotted curtain, checkered tablecloth, or potted plant. Yet her use of perspectival planes both situate and fragment the bodies they bisect, representing the boundaries that demarcate a space from the individual, and expanding the limits and potential for representation.
“Even in their ambiguity, the entwined couples in Quarles’ alluring works are understood as queer, a term that, like the paintings themselves, is devoted to the position that meaning should not be static or fixed and that there is power in destabilizing expectations.” Anne Ellegood, Made in L.A. 2018, Hammer Museum/DelMonico Prestel, 2018.
“Christina’s singular voice and vital artwork speak to our time and history. We are proud to showcase her extraordinary talent and look forward to presenting a solo exhibition of her work in the spring of 2019,” said Shaun Caley Regen.
Christina Quarles was born in Chicago, IL in 1985. She received a B.A. from Hampshire College and a M.F.A. from Yale University. In 2016 she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. She lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
Work by the artist has been featured in numerous group exhibitions including Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon, New Museum, New York; Fictions, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Reconstitution, LAXART, Los Angeles; Still Human, Rubell Family Collection, Miami; and Tight Squeeze, Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena; among others.
Her work is currently on view in Made in L.A. 2018, curated by Anne Ellegood and Erin Christovale, at the Hammer Museum through September 2. This summer she will be featured in BETWEEN at the Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR, and this fall she will have a solo exhibition at The MATRIX Program for Contemporary Art, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley.
Quarles has been the recipient of a number of awards and grants including the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant and the Robert Schoelkopf Memorial Traveling Fellowship at Yale University.
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