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 that struggle between the expectations of what is expected of her and her radical, indomitable will to live fully the ambiguity of gender and race, some vibrant paintings are born in which the bodies never rest. at all, they bristle, contort or frolic, often in eroticized positions, pushing the limits as if they wanted to escape the frame.
Christina Quarles is one of the young painters of the moment. After her participation in the central exhibition of the last Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, she is currently enjoying a major exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin and will be the protagonist of the new season of Hauser
“I am not trying to represent the human body itself, but to show what it is like to live inside your own body, in this case a queer and racialized body,” says the Angelina artist, whose works look out through the windows to the beautiful garden of olive trees and sculptures (Martin Creed, Paul McCarthy, Pipilotti Rist or the Barcelonan Laia Estruch…). Her bodies, naked and multicolored, never feel complete and it is even difficult to trace to which torso those legs or those often jumbled arms belong. Quarles reinvents figuration, eliminating faces and easily identifiable 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, he photographs the work and it will be a computer program that will determine the domestic environment in which they will be located.
In parallel to Come in From An Endless (until October 29), Hauser
