Christina Quarles, rising art world superstar, Chicago native, Los Angeles resident, visited the Museum of Contemporary Art the other morning. It was her first time visiting her new show, which is also her first major solo exhibition. The museum had just opened and the early crowd was a pandemic trickle. No one approached Quarles, though a couple nudged each other and whispered about her clothes: They were trying to decide if this woman, the one in the colorful pajamas, made all of this stuff on the walls. Probably, right? The watercolor softness of her outfit echoed the art works, plus some guy with a notebook was following her … They were right, she was the artist; but wrong that she was wearing pajamas. I also assumed she was in her pajamas.
“They’re not pajamas,” Quarles laughed. “They’re my transition back into the COVID world.”
You match the walls, I said.
“I look for clothes that remind me of my paintings,” she said, totally serious.
Christina Quarles echoes, pings, resonates.
If her last name sounds familiar: She’s the granddaughter of Norma Quarles, the longtime NBC and CNN reporter/anchor who was a fixture of TV news (and among the first Black TV journalists). Also, if you follow contemporary art at all, you’ve heard the name: For the past few years, any list of the most vital young artists in America would probably include Quarles. She’s among a small group credited with steering the art world back to figurative painting. In other words, after years of abstraction and conceptual “activations,” her images resemble something.
That said, nothing else about Quarles is quite so obvious.
“We installed this show on Zoom,” she said, meaning she was in Los Angeles talking to former MCA curator Grace Deveney and assistant curator Jack Schneider via screens. “I’ve been in this space many times and we had digital and physical models to work with, but being here, seeing it now, it seems so … different.”
She drifted towards a long, tall wall bisecting the gallery.
On the wall hung a painting of a person on their back, twisted at the hips, seemingly trapped beneath, well, a long, tall wall.
“This person is kind of being sliced with a guillotine, so the wall that the painting is hanging on is slicing the room itself. My work is very much about describing the feeling of being within your body. I am talking about ideas of race and gender and queerness, but I am less interested in naming those things than asking what it means to experience the world that way, through a racialized body, through a gendered body, through a queer body. One question I get from people who see my paintings: How many bodies are in these paintings? Because it’s not always clear.”
One of the ironies of her art is that, despite Quarles becoming known for the revival of figurative painting, her own figures contort and merge, morph and seemingly melt back into her canvases.
Sorta-figurative painting is more accurate.
“See, there’s three faces in this painting,” she said.
Oh, I thought that one was a cloud, I said.
“Well, there are in-between spaces of figuration and environment.”
I see, I said, not seeing.
And yet, she’s right — in a Christina Quarles painting, the ambiguity is the thing. Her work grabs at bits and pieces of influences, using stray shards of song titles and lyrics for painting titles, nodding to other artists, pop culture, gallery art, sci-fi, album covers, thrift-store patterns. She embraces vagueness. The lyrics in her painting titles — “Underneath It All,” “Dint Any Body Tell ‘Er,” “An Absense the Size of Yew,” etc. — are how she remembers those lyrics. She’s assembling strands and splinters and memories. She’s misquoting, she said.
“This painting here, the pool of water at the bottom, that’s kind of a David Hockney misquote. It’s the sort of reflecting pool he uses but it’s also something that’s long passed into pop culture, too — I mean, even Hockney was quoting from something else. Art is a long duration of quotes and misquotes, moving from high to mass culture, back to high, then to low.”
I don’t have my glasses on, I said.
“What a great way to see my show,” she said.
But I do see a little Kehinde Wiley in this one, I said.
“You mean his Obama portrait — the green in that, yeah. When people mention specific paintings they see, I more like: Well actually, here I’m referencing an ad in Harper’s, which is itself referencing something else. We take in and synthesize information all day long. But there’s always overload. So we try to see faces, figures, patterns — it helps us simplify that overload.”
I see a fence in this one.
“Or a candelabra.”
Or a gated community — the way you painted bodies flowing one into the next, in a continuous loop, that could be like the insular nature of a gated community and those are the gates?
“Oh, I don’t know. Narratives fall in and out of focus for me.”
You live in Pasadena?
“Altadena, close to Pasadena.”
Quarles, 36, is like her work, very chill, yet very full of art speak. She relishes the contradiction in the work, giving you a lot to question. To put it another way, you can imagine her paintings hanging above a couch, but they’re probably best shown in public, where they can challenge larger assumptions. Her big subject is the fluidity of identity and the difficulty of knowing oneself. She may be the perfect 2021 artist. In her practice statement, she writes: “The contradiction of my Black ancestry coupled with my fair skin results in my place always being my displace.” Her mother, white, was from Champaign-Urbana; her father, black, was from the South Side. She identifies as queer; she’s married to filmmaker Alyssa Polk. Her family moved out of Lincoln Park when she was age 4 but she returned often, living a while in Logan Square. Before receiving her MFA at Yale, she was a graphic designer, working on, as she explains, “immersive brand integrations.”
The metaphors run thick.
We stop before a large painting — truthfully, they’re all kind of large paintings. This one is titled “(Don’t They Know) It’s the End of the World.” It has deep velvet blues and greens the color of really excellent wallpaper and iron-lace windows and, again, a somewhat nebulous figure.
“I made this one shortly before the show was supposed to open originally (in spring 2020). It shipped out here the day all the toilet paper ran out! It’s how I responded. That kind of faux ironwork window, it comes from a Mexican restaurant. There had been a slow anxiety building while I was working on this show and knowing a pandemic lurked in the background. It’s what was running in my head: Everything was changing — but business as usual until further notice!”
Do people ever see David Cronenberg films in your work? His use of bodies?
“No, but I’ve watched him a lot.”
His bodies are more grotesque than yours.
“Yeah, but I see it. This crusty foot I painted right here. There are also, kind of like in a Cronenberg movie, a couple more parallels I guess: very fleshy images and digital interruptions.”
Quarles’ work routine is this:
“I start with the figures. But I don’t have a plan or a sketch book. I lay down broad strokes then take a lot of time not painting, just looking and trying to build figures out of what is an abstract starting point. Then I photograph the work, bring that photo into a computer and play around with the compositional elements (like the bodies) on Photoshop.” She paints the final work using her digital manipulations as a loose roadmap. “It’s all paint, but I tape off areas while working —”
So some of it has a 3-D quality, resembling large stickers over paint.
“People say that. But it’s all acrylics and none of it’s collage.”
Her paintings are reminiscent of David Cronenberg in another way, too: The longer you look, the less convinced you are of what you’re seeing. Men? Women? Black? White? One figure? Four?
We sit on a bench before a giant trompe ‘l oeil, a visual trick of sorts, a single painting broken up into three 12-foot walls then spaced apart and arranged to create an illusion of depth. The edges of the painting, as in many of her paintings, blurs the boundaries of the canvas. “I want to give a voice to things I have been thinking about a long time. People then were less on board with that conversation, about ambiguity, queerness … It’s on people’s minds now, and I hope they look at this work and see an experience that is not fixed, one that’s harder to represent with language.”
I see, superficially, something vaguely sci-fi.
“And I read sci-fi, I also watch sci-fi films — I see a lot of films because my wife is a filmmaker.”
What kind of films does she make?
“I don’t know … narrative?”
I bet she’d love to hear that.
“That’s what she says about me! What kind of art does Christina make? ‘Oh, I don’t know.'”
“Christina Quarles” runs through Sept. 5 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave.; 312-280-2660 and mcachicago.org
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
