Christina Quarles - 20th Century & Contemporary Art, Evening Sale Part II New York Tuesday, November 14, 2023 | Phillips
  • Amorphous, dripping body parts spill across a yellow and black checkered floor in Christina Quarles’ Floored. Created in 2017, the year of the artist’s first ever solo exhibition, which launched her to widespread critical acclaim, Floored displays Quarles’ signature, undefinable bodies, bending and intersecting across a spliced picture plane, in a ripe visual synthesis of the multiple, shifting aspects of the self. Subverting the trope of the female nude in art history, Quarles’ paintings upend our preconceived notions of race, gender, and space.

     

    Egon Schiele, Kneeling Girl, Resting on Both Elbows, 1917. Leopold Museum, Vienna.

    As a “queer, cis woman who is black but is often mistaken as white,” Quarles is fascinated by the dissonance between how one’s identity is perceived, and how one perceives oneself.i Her distorted and fragmented figures register the contradictions between external and internal perceptions of self, through a “layering of information [which] bypasses singularity for simultaneity.”ii In Floored, it is challenging to discern how many figures are splayed across the floor—and which limbs belong to which person. Quarles eschews anatomical reality in order to paint “portraits of living within a body,” as she says; touching, feeling, moving—the seven-fingered hand stroking the face at upper left, for instance, registers how it feels to be touched from within the body, feeling fingers curve and brush against skin.iii

     

    The artist relishes the ambiguity of her figures, and the way in which her compositions encourage the viewer look closely and puzzle out each body. “I like to play with the desire I think we all have to complete the image, and whenever possible, to complete it into a figure,” she explains.iv The viewer assumes, based on the presence of recognizable features, like the hands, feet, and breasts in Floored, that Quarles’ forms are all body parts; Quarles hopes to introduce just enough ambiguity to her compositions to “nudge people enough in the direction of questioning their initial assumptions.”v

     

    Mickalene Thomas, Racquel Reclining Wearing Purple Jumpsuit, 2016. Private Collection. Artwork: © 2023 Mickalene Thomas / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 

     

    The division of space in Floored, too, adds to the perceived ambiguity of the composition. As Quarles shares, she begins each painting with the fragmented shapes and abstract brushstrokes that will become her figures. Once these shapes are “fleshed out” on canvas, she pauses, photographs the work, and then takes it into Adobe Illustrator, where she digitally draws over the photograph to place “the patterns and the planes and the areas that really start to interrupt the figure.”vi After this digital intervention, Quarles returns to the canvas to complete the work; the splicing of her figures across planes, then, is quite literally built into her painting process, as she shifts from canvas, to computer screen, and back again. The figure(s) of Floored exist in three planes of reality at once—the pink sky, the checkered floor, and a murky, subterranean layer of hazy yellow and grey.

     

    Quarles’ ambitions to upend assumptions about figurative painting are inherently antipatriarchal, antiracist, and queer. With a traditional canon dominated by paintings of nude women by white men, Quarles’ queer gaze, like that of Mickalene Thomas or Jenna Gribbon, calls into question the power dynamics of her figurative representations. The practice of figure drawing—which Quarles has participated in since the age of twelve—relies on direct observation, and rewards the artist who is best able to see the physical body before them. Quarles’ figures, with their twisting limbs, extra fingers, and blue-grey shadows, overlap and intersect in ways that defy any sense of figural reality; these are “bodies that resist a fixing gaze.”vii

     

     

    i Christina Quarles, quoted in Christina Quarles, Matrix 271, exh. brochure, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum, 2018, online.

    ii Andrew Bonacina, “In Likeness,” in Christina Quarles, exh. cat., The Hepworth Wakefield, 2019, p. 25.

    iii Quarles, quoted in “Intimacy, Unknowing, and Discovery: David J. Getsy in conversation with Christina Quarles,” ibid., p. 34.

    iv Ibid.

    v Ibid.

    vi Ibid., p. 31.

    vii Bonacina, ibid.

    • Provenance

      Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles
      Private Collection
      Acquired from the above by the present owner

    • Exhibited

      Los Angeles, Michael Kohn Gallery, Engender, November 11, 2017–January 27, 2018

    • Literature

      “ENGENDER. Kohn Gallery,” The Menu by Quiet Lunch, October 5, 2017, online (illustrated)
      Christopher Harrity, “13 Works of Art Beyond the Binary,” Advocate, October 16, 2017, online (illustrated)
      Sasha Bogojev, “17 Artists Take on Gender Identity in "Engender" @ Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles,” Juxtapoz, October 30, 2017, online (illustrated)
      Adam Lehrer, ““Engender” At Kohn Gallery: 8 Artists On How Gender Functions In Their Work,” UNTITLED, November 7, 2017, online (illustrated)
      Katy Donoghue, “Beyond Binary: Joshua Friedman on “Engender” at Kohn Gallery,” whitewall, November 16, 2017, online (illustrated)
      Joel Martens, “ENGENDER: The Subjectivity of Male and Female,” The Rage, December 5, 2017, online (illustrated)
      Eve Wood, “Engender at Michael Kohn Gallery,” Art and Cake, December 8, 2017, online (illustrated)
      Ezrha Jean Black, “Artillery Best in Show 2017,” Artillery, January 2, 2018, online (illustrated)
      Michael Slenske and Molly Langmuir, “Who’s Afraid of the Female Nude? Paintings of naked women, usually by clothed men, are suddenly sitting very uncomfortably on gallery walls,” The Cut, New York Magazine, April 16, 2018, online (illustrated)

    • Artist Biography

      Christina Quarles

      As a queer woman born to a black father and a white mother, Christina Quarles has developed a worldview defined by multiplicity. Often misrepresented as a white woman in life, Quarles creates work that confronts ideas of race, gender, and queerness. The highly expressive human forms of Quarles’s paintings hover between figuration and abstraction, paradoxically occupying both spaces at once. By incorporating the contradictions of identity into her painting, Quarles has developed an art form defined by energized formal inventiveness and semi-pictorial abstraction that has been likened to the early work of Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, breathing new life into the historical legacies of their work.  

      Quarles was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1985 and was raised in Los Angeles, California. She completed her BA at Hampshire College in 2007 and earned her MFA at Yale University in 2016. Today, Quarles lives and works in Los Angeles with her wife.  

       
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Floored

signed, titled and dated "Christina Quarles 2017 "FLOORED"" on the reverse
acrylic on canvas
40 x 50 1/8 in. (101.6 x 127.3 cm)
Painted in 2017.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$250,000 - 350,000 

Sold for $228,600

Contact Specialist

Carolyn Kolberg
Associate Specialist, Head of Evening Sale, New York
+1 212 940 1206
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20th Century & Contemporary Art, Evening Sale Part II

New York Auction 14 November 2023