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Lot Essay
A refreshing new voice in the art market for her surrealist figurations and bold compositional depth, Christina Quarles’ Fallback, Back/Side arrives to market following the artist’s exceptional praise at the 2022 Venice Biennale. Commanding in scale at a life-size five feet by four feet, the present example is an immersive exploration of figuration and the meeting of bodies. The artist’s astonishing proficiency in color and form creates a surreal world in and of itself, one within which bodies are comprised of abstracted lines and faces are rendered down to simple lines and sunset hues. Fallback, Back/Side is both a portrait and a fairy tale captured whimsically within a sensuous dreamscape.
Illustrated are two figures whose limbs are intertwined in an embrace so intimately that the series of overlapping forms confuse a clear distinction between each individual. Spidery hands and abstracted faces appear to belong to the same central torso, perhaps a nod to the artist’s contemplations of the multiplicity of identity and the self. Stretching and expanding into three painted planes, these figures resist the constraints of the canvas. A recurrent theme of Quarles’ oeuvre, these seemingly cramped figures reference the artist’s feeling of displacement as a queer, mixed-race artist within a larger culture of heteronormativity. The figures’ feet descend below the central plane into a Hockney-inspired passage of water. Quarles leaves this passage unfinished, making vulnerable her hand and offering the viewer an access point to complete the image with their own self-perceptions. The figures rest upon a central plane of green, their torsos floating in a cloudy sky of blue. The figures’ upper registers push up into a linear passage of horizontal lines that alternate between midnight blues and hazy sunset oranges. One might recall Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1872), in which the suggestion of light and emotion engenders a floating world of fantasy and flowing pigment. Fallback, Back/Side likewise plays with space, abstraction, and depth, creating a three-dimensional scene composed of interrelated flat planes. As critic Daniel Culpan has written, “Quarles manipulates paint with the energy of a sculptor. Her acrylic is gouged and impastoed, built up into peaks and then stenciled away. Monumental in scale, the canvases raise haptic possibilities” (D. Culpan, “Critics’ Picks: Christina Quarles,” Artforum, n.d., https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/202101/christina-quarles-84701). Quarles’s bodies are tactile and vibrating with the energy of the artist’s hand.
A learned artist, Quarles imbues her canvases with references to art historical icons including Egon Schiele, Frida Kahlo, David Hockney and Philip Guston. The artist is also divinely inspired by Surrealism, translating the tenets of the movement – the embrace of the unconscious and the fantastical in the place of realism – to a contemporary context. As the Surrealists unraveled their figures into playful storms of fantastical imagery, Quarles breaks down the norms of space and figuration to reject the limiting confines of gender, sexuality and race that inform her own personal identity. Musing on the fluidity of the self, Quarles uses her canvases to portray the feeling of inhabiting a non-normative body.
Quarles starts her pictures with a series of abstract gestural brushstrokes, exercising great restraint in not completing any of the lines into recognizable forms. Once she has allowed enough time for her lines to breathe, she then returns to the canvas and builds figures from them. The artist then transfers an image of her figures onto Adobe PhotoShop where she maps various planes of texture and color around them, ultimately using it as a guide to print and paint the patterns directly onto the canvas. On her process, Quarles notes, “I don’t start with sketches or any sort of preconceived idea. It begins pretty abstractly, a lot of fragmented shapes and abstract brush strokes. I try to resist the urge to complete the figure” (C. Quarles, quoted in A. Bonacina and D. Getsy, Christina Quarles: In Likeness, ex. cat., Wakefield, 2019, p. 31). This rejection of completion is central to Quarles’s methodology of expanding how one think about bodies and their relationships. Painting figures that are daringly unrecognizable and uniquely comprised, Quarles offers each viewer the chance to approach the canvas with their own lived experiences and find themselves within it.
An audacious and rigorous painter, Quarles has carved an incomparable space for herself within the L.A. art scene. Globally, the artist has propelled to great acclaim, with her works most recently being featured in a central room at the 2022 Venice Biennale. She was also a fixture of Made in L.A. at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles in 2018, and has mounted solo exhibitions at the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA, the Hepworth Wakefield Museum, Wakefield, UK, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Frye Art Museum, Seattle. Her work so entranced critics that Peter Schjeldahl wrote early in her career that her work “rhymes ambiguous imagery of gyrating bodies with dynamics of disparate pictorial techniques” (P. Schjeldahl, “The Art World as a Safe Space,” The New Yorker, October 9, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/09/the-art-world-as-safe-space).
Illustrated are two figures whose limbs are intertwined in an embrace so intimately that the series of overlapping forms confuse a clear distinction between each individual. Spidery hands and abstracted faces appear to belong to the same central torso, perhaps a nod to the artist’s contemplations of the multiplicity of identity and the self. Stretching and expanding into three painted planes, these figures resist the constraints of the canvas. A recurrent theme of Quarles’ oeuvre, these seemingly cramped figures reference the artist’s feeling of displacement as a queer, mixed-race artist within a larger culture of heteronormativity. The figures’ feet descend below the central plane into a Hockney-inspired passage of water. Quarles leaves this passage unfinished, making vulnerable her hand and offering the viewer an access point to complete the image with their own self-perceptions. The figures rest upon a central plane of green, their torsos floating in a cloudy sky of blue. The figures’ upper registers push up into a linear passage of horizontal lines that alternate between midnight blues and hazy sunset oranges. One might recall Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1872), in which the suggestion of light and emotion engenders a floating world of fantasy and flowing pigment. Fallback, Back/Side likewise plays with space, abstraction, and depth, creating a three-dimensional scene composed of interrelated flat planes. As critic Daniel Culpan has written, “Quarles manipulates paint with the energy of a sculptor. Her acrylic is gouged and impastoed, built up into peaks and then stenciled away. Monumental in scale, the canvases raise haptic possibilities” (D. Culpan, “Critics’ Picks: Christina Quarles,” Artforum, n.d., https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/202101/christina-quarles-84701). Quarles’s bodies are tactile and vibrating with the energy of the artist’s hand.
A learned artist, Quarles imbues her canvases with references to art historical icons including Egon Schiele, Frida Kahlo, David Hockney and Philip Guston. The artist is also divinely inspired by Surrealism, translating the tenets of the movement – the embrace of the unconscious and the fantastical in the place of realism – to a contemporary context. As the Surrealists unraveled their figures into playful storms of fantastical imagery, Quarles breaks down the norms of space and figuration to reject the limiting confines of gender, sexuality and race that inform her own personal identity. Musing on the fluidity of the self, Quarles uses her canvases to portray the feeling of inhabiting a non-normative body.
Quarles starts her pictures with a series of abstract gestural brushstrokes, exercising great restraint in not completing any of the lines into recognizable forms. Once she has allowed enough time for her lines to breathe, she then returns to the canvas and builds figures from them. The artist then transfers an image of her figures onto Adobe PhotoShop where she maps various planes of texture and color around them, ultimately using it as a guide to print and paint the patterns directly onto the canvas. On her process, Quarles notes, “I don’t start with sketches or any sort of preconceived idea. It begins pretty abstractly, a lot of fragmented shapes and abstract brush strokes. I try to resist the urge to complete the figure” (C. Quarles, quoted in A. Bonacina and D. Getsy, Christina Quarles: In Likeness, ex. cat., Wakefield, 2019, p. 31). This rejection of completion is central to Quarles’s methodology of expanding how one think about bodies and their relationships. Painting figures that are daringly unrecognizable and uniquely comprised, Quarles offers each viewer the chance to approach the canvas with their own lived experiences and find themselves within it.
An audacious and rigorous painter, Quarles has carved an incomparable space for herself within the L.A. art scene. Globally, the artist has propelled to great acclaim, with her works most recently being featured in a central room at the 2022 Venice Biennale. She was also a fixture of Made in L.A. at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles in 2018, and has mounted solo exhibitions at the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA, the Hepworth Wakefield Museum, Wakefield, UK, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Frye Art Museum, Seattle. Her work so entranced critics that Peter Schjeldahl wrote early in her career that her work “rhymes ambiguous imagery of gyrating bodies with dynamics of disparate pictorial techniques” (P. Schjeldahl, “The Art World as a Safe Space,” The New Yorker, October 9, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/09/the-art-world-as-safe-space).