Overview
New Century Contemporary Art Foundation Pond Society presents a solo exhibition of paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Christina Quarles, from November 5th, 2019 to January 15th, 2020. Featuring five recent works, the exhibition marks the artist’s first solo presentation in China, and coincides with her first solo European museum exhibition, currently on view at The Hepworth Wakefield in England.
The exhibition presents five medium-sized paintings that feature distinctive composite figurations of androgynous bodies with limbs navigating through patterned planes. Decorative motifs ranging from plaids and florals to checkerboard and lattice, form the backdrops against which her figures writhe, balancing the overall composition and color palette of each painting. Inspired by literature, poetry, music and other cultural forms, her works often quote poems or lyrics, and are even sometimes titled in reference. The relationship between text and image in her practice inherits the legacy of cubism and other modernist approaches in painting - the text on canvas plays a purely functional role in form, balancing the objective figurations in bright colors, rich texture and exaggerative curves.
Quarles’ drawings utilize the line to render figures that are clear yet vague, dissolving the isolated subjectivity when they fuse with other figures or blend into the surrounding still life. Her depiction of lines makes her pictures abstract and dense, which is not simply drawn from a direct, irrational expression. There is a solid logic behind her “vague lines”. “I try to separate out the ideas of the ‘vague’ and the ‘ambiguous.’” Quarles explains how identity is thematically woven into her canvases, “The ‘vague’ lacks comprehension because it lacks information and with the ‘ambiguous’, there’s so much information that it starts to contradict itself and fall apart.”
Art critic Alpesh Kantilal Patel’s comment on a Quarles’ solo exhibition in 2017 in Artforum pointed out that titles such as Tell Me Tell Me Yull Be Alright, When Yer in Tha Shade not only simply refer to pop music, but also suggest the cultural hierarchy through the use of regional accent in English. For Quarles, her inspirations range from classic works in art history to pop cultural trends. "Growing up next to LACMA was amazing, but my cousin also gave me all his old MAD magazines as a kid, which are all still in my studio’s bathroom." Quarles draws inspiration from a vast number of sources ranging from the famous African-American female writer Audre Lorde to the emerging rapper Chance the Rapper who recently gained great success.
