Christina Quarles was born in 1985 to a black father and a white mother. Her skin is fair and freckled, and she remembers that as a child, in Los Angeles, when her playmates asked her about her family origins, they never took her seriously and called her a liar. “‘You’re not half black, you’re white,’ they told me, and I didn’t understand why the way others saw me didn’t correspond to how I felt in a multiracial body.” She also defines herself as a queer cisgender woman, and from this struggle between what is expected of her and her radical, indomitable will to fully experience gender and racial ambiguity, vibrant paintings are born in which the bodies they never rest completely, they twist, twist or play, often in erotic positions, pushing the limits as if they want to escape the frame.
Christina Quarles is one of the young painters of the moment. After his participation in the central exhibition of the Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, he is currently enjoying a major exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin and will be the star of Hauser’s new season
“I’m not trying to represent the human body in itself, but to show what it’s like to live inside your own body, in this case a queer and racialized body,” says the artist from Los Angeles, whose works come out through the windows in the beautiful garden of olive trees and sculptures (Martin Creed, Paul McCarthy, Pipilotti Rist or Barcelona’s Laia Estruch…). Their bodies, naked and multi-colored, never feel complete and it’s even hard to trace which torso those legs or those often-messed-up arms belong to. Quarles reinvents figuration, eliminating easily identifiable faces and characters, atomizing the bodies and giving them an ambiguity that leads to the composition process itself, where he combines the artisanal and the technological: after drawing human figures or parts of the body, photograph the work and it will be a computer program that will determine the female domestic environment in which they will be placed.
In parallel with Come in from an endless (until October 29), Hauser
