Christina Quarles: Tripping Over My Joy

10 Oct-16 Dec 2023

Christina Quarles, Here We Come Again, 2023. Credit: Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London

Overview

Pilar Corrias is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Christina Quarles to inaugurate the gallery’s new 5000 m2 two-storey flagship space at 49–51 Conduit Street, Mayfair.

In the artist’s fourth exhibition with the gallery – which follows her critically-acclaimed solo show at Hamburger Bahnhof – Quarles will debut an expansive series of paintings and works on paper.

Her highly original approach to painting has earned Quarles a reputation as one of the most significant voices in contemporary art. Influenced by her experience as a queer, multiracial woman, Quarles employs a unique method to investigate notions of identity and representation through a practice encompassing paintings, works on paper and installations.

Surreal, expressive and fluid, her large-scale, vibrantly-coloured and textured paintings such as Here We Come Again (2023) teem with bodies reconfigured into ambiguous forms that defy categorisation. She begins her multistage process by painting freely before photographing and transferring these emerging forms to a computer, where she renders digital patterns and planes. Quarles then prints these designs as stencils. Often layering one on top of the other, while painting in the negative space, she builds complex architectural schemes that ground and dislocate her figures in space. Known for her mastery of a variety of techniques, Quarles might use a combination of masking, washes, impasto and trompe l’oeil in a single painting.

Quarles comments: “These works are portraits but not in the traditional sense of looking at a body—they’re portraits of living within your own body. They portray moments of intimacy where you can exist in all your contradictions and complications.”

Since 2017, Quarles’s work has been represented by Pilar Corrias. In 2018, she had her first solo exhibition, Slump Love, at the gallery in London.

Artists