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 Are the figures in a painting by Christina Quarles taking shape or dematerializing? Solidifying or dissolving? The viewer can’t be sure. That indeterminacy reflects the artist’s sense of who she is.

A mixed-race queer woman living in Los Angeles, Quarles was the breakout discovery of the New Museum’s “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon” group show in 2017. In that setting, her paintings seemed to be addressing gender fluidity. But, as she told me then, it’s race, not gender, that has preoccupied her since childhood. “Mom is white, Dad is Black,” she explained. “I am fair-skinned and usually seen as white by white people, but I’m seen more as mixed identity in communities of color.” Her racial profile depends on the context of the moment. “My experience is firmly rooted in whiteness and Blackness, rather than a hybrid of the two,” she said. Owl My perfect day Wake up read books shirt

Four years later, with her concerns more timely than ever, Quarles, 36, is having her largest solo museum show, which runs through August, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. (The exhibition will travel to the Frye Art Museum in Seattle.) “Legibility, the way we understand things, is through this either/or mentality, but the reality is we have a both/and situation,” she told me when we spoke again this past December. “And that’s where a lot of my work comes from.” She endorses what she calls “the idea of ambiguity as an excess of information” and observes that “there can be more legs than would normally go with one torso” in her paintings. “The viewer’s desire to see a cohesive figure will override the ambiguity.”

Her subjects usually possess female attributes, breasts in particular. “I like boobs in a picture, because they define weight,” she said. But the figures are not recognizably women—they are body fragments that waver on the edge of integration. Even her way of constructing a picture fluctuates between opposite poles. She will begin by making gestural marks with paint until bodily shapes seem to emerge. “I try to resist the urge to complete any figure or form when I first lay down the paint on canvas,” she said. “I’m always trying to pull out images that I didn’t originally plan. Maybe in this figure this was another leg, but then it became more interesting as an elbow.” At a certain stage, she will stop, photograph the painting-in-progress, and play with the digital image on her computer, adding patterned surfaces or angled planes, which she will then paint on the canvas by using stencils or laser-printed vinyl stickers. Along with producing very different-looking results, the processes feel different. “In painting, I learned to use the physicality of the body,” she said. “A wrist is a clumsy tool to make a circle, but the shoulder turns in a circular motion. Digital adds a different element. You’re just using your fingertips.”

 

 

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