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Lot Essay
Christina Quarles’s paintings transport us to a realm of peculiarly contorted figures, stretching and reeling in fluid, unfixed movement. Her characters often have elongated torsos, prolonged necks and gangling limbs, as if viewed through a funhouse mirror. Then Tha Dust Settles (2017) is an exemplar of her dynamic practice. Its composition reflects the tangled complexity of human identity and relationships. A nude body sits on the floor, bounded by the corners of the canvas. Its skin is tinged with grey, green, purple and red, redolent of the paintings of Viennese Expressionist Egon Schiele. It leans against the back of a second figure, seeking an intimate connection; this other figure, its head a diaphanous sweep of orange, reaches rangy fingers down the sitter’s thigh. The intimation of a third body appears in graphic, chequered yellow and black, hoisting a vaporous bunch of flowers over its shoulder. Inky slicks of green and blue rain down the painting’s lower reaches. Elsewhere, crisp fields of colour are masked off, or areas of raw canvas stained with delicate pigment. In 2017-2018, the work was included in the group exhibition Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon at the New Museum, New York.
Quarles has established herself as one of the most virtuosic painters working today. Born in Chicago, she grew up in Los Angeles following her parents’ divorce and remains resident there today. Although a talented artist as a child, Quarles spent her undergraduate years studying critical race theory and philosophy. She was driven to visual art after finding it offered a freer outlet for exploring her interests in identity, including her own as a queer woman and a mixed race person with light, freckled skin. Quarles graduated with an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2016. Her work has attracted numerous plaudits since. She featured in the 2020 Whitechapel Gallery group show Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium and has staged major institutional shows in Chicago, London and Berlin. Her works are held in multiple museum collections.
Then Tha Dust Settles is both a capsule of Quarles’ ongoing concerns and a showcase of her astonishing talents. When it appeared in the New Museum’s exhibition in 2017, critic Peter Schjeldahl highlighted Quarles’ work as a highlight. ‘The wholes and parts of bodies in Quarles’s cheerfully orgiastic pictures entangle in alternating styles of line, stroke, stain, and smear’, he wrote (P. Schjeldahl, ‘Art World as Safe Space’, The New Yorker, 2 October 2017). He also compared them to the flowing, liquefied works of Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning: American artists who similarly danced on the borderline between figuration and abstraction. Quarles often works freehand, composing her improvisatory paintings as she goes alone. Then Tha Dust Settles captures the artist at her ingenious best, attuned to the flux and spontaneity of life itself.
Quarles has established herself as one of the most virtuosic painters working today. Born in Chicago, she grew up in Los Angeles following her parents’ divorce and remains resident there today. Although a talented artist as a child, Quarles spent her undergraduate years studying critical race theory and philosophy. She was driven to visual art after finding it offered a freer outlet for exploring her interests in identity, including her own as a queer woman and a mixed race person with light, freckled skin. Quarles graduated with an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2016. Her work has attracted numerous plaudits since. She featured in the 2020 Whitechapel Gallery group show Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium and has staged major institutional shows in Chicago, London and Berlin. Her works are held in multiple museum collections.
Then Tha Dust Settles is both a capsule of Quarles’ ongoing concerns and a showcase of her astonishing talents. When it appeared in the New Museum’s exhibition in 2017, critic Peter Schjeldahl highlighted Quarles’ work as a highlight. ‘The wholes and parts of bodies in Quarles’s cheerfully orgiastic pictures entangle in alternating styles of line, stroke, stain, and smear’, he wrote (P. Schjeldahl, ‘Art World as Safe Space’, The New Yorker, 2 October 2017). He also compared them to the flowing, liquefied works of Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning: American artists who similarly danced on the borderline between figuration and abstraction. Quarles often works freehand, composing her improvisatory paintings as she goes alone. Then Tha Dust Settles captures the artist at her ingenious best, attuned to the flux and spontaneity of life itself.