“I’m interested in depicting an experience of living in a body rather than looking at a body.”
—Christina Quarles
Christina Quarles created Laid Up, 2020, a ten-color silkscreen print in an edition of 35, to accompany the exhibition Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium, February 6 – August 30, 2020.
Christina Quarles' edition for Whitechapel Gallery is closely related to her recent paintings, which feature entwined nude figures within flat abstracted environments. She draws on her background as a graphic designer to develop her compositions and creates some elements with computer software such as Adobe Illustrator. Quarles explores female, black and queer identity through the active agency of these contorted bodies pressing against the confines of the canvas and reflecting her experience of feeling fragmented in her own body.
Laid Up depicts bodies enmeshed in a close embrace of limbs, torsos and heads against a patterned background. The composition hems the figures in to a complicated entanglement. The lines drawn between one body and another are ambiguous and the figures fold and overlap. Made during Spring 2020, the title of the print, Laid Up could also be seen as a nod to the monotony of pandemic life in lockdown. Like her paintings, this silkscreen print is made from a process of intricate layering, with mat and gloss inks combining to create a seductive surface. Quarles describes this layering process as “looking for patterns that have… a sort of visual punning and multiple locations, like a field of flowers that’s a pattern on a bedspread or a field of flowers in nature.” – White Chapel Gallery
