Christina Quarles

A series of new works by Christina Quarles are on view as part of the 59th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia, titled The Milk of Dreams.

Curated by Cecilia Alemani, the Biennale’s main exhibition features over two hundred artists from 58 countries, the majority of whom are female and gender non-conforming.

In a wide-ranging, transhistorical approach, kinships and affinities between artistic methods and practices are traced to create new layers of meaning. What emerges is a historical narrative that is built around forms of symbiosis, solidarity, and sisterhood.

Quarles presents six new paintings that, via an excess of gestures in jarring pigments, unravel abstract figures that exceed beyond the moulds of the conventional constitution of a body.

With a background in graphic design, the artist pairs the fortuitous effects of dripping and seemingly improvisational rapid brushstrokes with digital manipulation and laser-cut stencils, creating defined outlines to plan and form composition. The sinuous bodies contort, conjuring a sense of intimacy and fluidity, of interchangeable existences rendering the impossibility of outlining singular beings – as in the entwining bodies in Hangin’ There, Baby (2021) and array of frenzied pigments in Gone on Too Long (2021). Appearing to cross a spatial zone of contradictory motions, on one axis the bodies conjoin and on the other they break – namely the figures chaotically pulling at, pushing away, and stepping over each other in Just a Lil’ Longer (2021).

Embracing, colliding, and merging, the rotating subjects with protruding limbs give the impression of movement and shapeshifting in their converging. In Don’t Let It Bring Yew Down (It’s Only Castles Burnin’) (2021), entangled forms holding each other up, shaped by contours and gradients, bear witness to two others that appear to drag each other in a dance on a plane reminiscent of parquet flooring. Geometrical planes and architectural devices that allude to domestic environments such as the curtain in (Who Could Say) We’re Not Jus’ as We Were (2021) centre the depthless forms in space by framing the gangly figures. In Had a Gud Time Now (Who Could Say) (2021), the extremities of subjects penetrate, sink, and emerge from a spatial plane depicted as a gingham tablecloth.

By assuming the forms of leaking vessels portrayed in myriad patterns and psychedelic hues, Quarles disrupts pictorial norms that uphold traditional conventions of race, gender, sexuality, and identity. The artist seeks to convey embodiment that eludes definition and to mark identities in flux by employing fragmentation to depict the slippery, multiple self. The work reflects the artist’s lived subjectivity in the persistent experience of being misread as a queer, mixed-race, cis woman with the subsequent desire to destabilise societal expectations. As if pushing up against and trying to exceed the boundaries of the frame, the bodies suggest an alternative physicality defined by ambiguity.