Christina Quarles has a means of stretching paint to its limits. Biracial and queer, she offers her photos of our bodies an elasticity and fluidity that’s beautiful. On the identical time, she explores the plasticity of acrylic paint, layered on the canvas like a second pores and skin or utilized over digitally generated stencils to appear to be giant stickers—therefore there may be a lot discuss her work as collage, even when her medium is solely acrylic.
Quarles has explored the facility and vulnerability of the self on this means since incomes her Grasp of Superb Arts diploma from Yale College in 2016. However her new work, made after the Eaton hearth decimated her Altadena group final yr, appears much more “untethered”, as she says. One other phrase for it’s wild, as guests can see in The Floor Glows Black, her first solo exhibition with Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles.
Quarles’s Fuck This Muck (Yer Bringin’ Me Down) (2025), which the artist describes as “simply being form of caught within the muck”
© Christina Quarles; Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Pilar Corrias, London; Photograph: Fredrik Nilsen
The Artwork Newspaper: Considered one of your new work is titled Fuck this Muck (Yer Bringin’ Me Down), good for this political second, or this previous yr of “hearth and ice” (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) in Los Angeles.
Christina Quarles: I not often use curse phrases in my titles, but it surely was what I used to be feeling. In all my titles, I attempt to reference my way of thinking after I’m making the work or one thing I’ve been listening to, a means of anchoring that second in time. For that one, I used to be portray this mucky, swampy leg rising from the bottom. It’s this sense of being introduced down: each time you attempt to stand up, simply being form of caught within the muck.
You might be additionally creating the impression of those deep areas within the new canvases, like wormholes or wombs to climb inside.
I like the learn of them being these type of portals or wombs. I see them as situations of ambient mild, like moonlight or streetlight. I’ve been actually concerned about monochromatic, mild like a sodium-vapour lamp—these situations the place mild truly removes color and strips away a color spectrum whereas illuminating an area.
What are sodium-vapour lights often used for?
I truly assume I’m going to carry them into the present in a single space. They was utilized in streetlights, these yellowy streetlights that have been all over the place earlier than LEDs. The Exploratorium in San Francisco has this Monochromatic Room, the place a rainbow-arc mural is uncovered to sodium-vapour mild and appears like all these sepias and greys. I’ve been actually on this, I feel in response to what my complete world regarded like after the Eaton hearth, simply this stripping of color.
How terrible—dropping your private home within the hearth.
We’d truly had a home hearth the yr prior, so the Eaton hearth burned down the Airbnb we have been staying at and the home we have been rebuilding. It’s been an fascinating type of doubling of grief.
Quarles’s Is This The Return to Oz? (2025)
© Christina Quarles; Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Pilar Corrias, London; Photograph: Fredrik Nilsen
So your daughter, who’s 4 years outdated, has been via two fires?
My good friend was so unhappy, as a result of she had purchased our daughter a substitute trampoline after the primary hearth after which it burned down within the second hearth. She’s like: “What number of little trampolines does this youngster have to have inher life?”
Do you assume motherhood is displaying up in your work in any seen or considerable means?
The works on paper I’m doing arose from the totally different relationship to time you could have as a guardian, once you now not have entry to those lengthy stretches of uninterrupted time. My spouse is perhaps doing pick-up, however I’m nonetheless excited about being residence for bathtub time. The works on paper are a means for me to hurry up the advanced set of feelings that occur after I make a portray.
Are these works paint on paper?
Usually, sure. However for this present, I used to be concerned about working with charcoal, which has apparent connections to the post-fire expertise that I’m residing in. I all the time hated charcoal, as a result of it’s so messy and has this nail-on-chalkboard sensation. It offers me the icks, as a result of it’s so dry. So I’ve been experimenting with work with charcoal in a means that’s extra in dialog with paint, utilizing powdered charcoal and a brush and water. It’s fascinating, as a result of charcoal has this slim attain for the way a lot you possibly can construct up and take away. It’s about constructing a picture via removing, via erasing. I’ve even been reducing into the paper after which tearing it away, like reverse collaging, to offer readability to the work.
A few of your new work are so dense with these tangles of limbs.
My work are all the time actually kitchen sink, every part’s thrown into them. However I feel that these newest works are like two or three of my work jammed collectively. There’s a dysregulation having a lot of my sense of residence and place and group simply frequently uprooted. Concurrently, we’re residing in a time when traditionally and culturally issues really feel very untethered. My work was already coping with multiplicity and ambiguity—now it’s like that’s being thrown right into a fun-house mirror.
Christina Quarles: The Floor Glows Black, Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles, till 3 Might
