Christina Quarles

Christina Quarles

06.10.2020 - 28.11.2020

Pilar Corrias is pleased to present Christina Quarles, an exhibition of new works by the artist opening in the gallery in October 2020.

Quarles’ practice is constantly developing, her work becoming ever more intricate and layered. The polymorphous figures in this latest body of work, for example, are more contorted, elastic and attenuated than ever before.

Quarles’ figures eschew fixed categories of gender and race, and are conspicuously ambiguous in this regard. Bodies melt into one another and are turned inside out, resisting straightforward legibility and, in turn, precluding the possibility of fixed definition.

Traces of the same body-parts, shown from different angles, frequently appear more than once, as if to imply a sequence of movements, as well as the possibility of different, though concurrent, modes of existence and states of being: a fluid and dynamic multiplicity of potential selves and identities.

Motifs of transparent light and spectral gradients suspend the figures in a reality that is simultaneously physical and digital. Pools of water, grass, flowers, trees, and rain anchor the tangle of fragmented bodies, hinting at the harsh reality of the world which we have created for ourselves.

Christina Quarles (b. 1985 Chicago, USA) currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She received an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2016, and holds a BA from Hampshire College. Quarles was a 2016 participant at the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture. She was the inaugural recipient of the 2019 Pérez Art Museum Miami Prize and in 2017 she received the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. Upcoming solo exhibitions include South London Gallery (2021); MCA Chicago (2021); and X Museum, Shanghai (2021). Recent exhibitions include: Radical Figures, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2020); Christina Quarles, Pond Society, Shanghai (2019); In Likeness, Hepworth Wakefield (2019); Kiss My Genders, Hayward Gallery, London (2019); Paint, also known as Blood, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2019); The Foundation of the Museum: MOCA’s Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2019-20); Stonewall 50, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2019); But I Woke Jus’ Tha Same, Regen Projects, Los Angeles (2019); Always Brightest Before Tha Dusk, Pilar Corrias, London (2018); Christina Quarles / MATRIX 271, UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley (2018); Made in L.A., Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); Trigger: Gender as a Tool and as a Weapon, New Museum, New York (2017-18); and Fictions, The Studio Museum, New York (2017) among others.

Pilar Corrias, London is open Monday-Friday, 11am - 6pm and Saturday by pre-booked appointment only.