Christina Quarles makes paintings that depict abstracted bodies intersecting painterly forms on the canvas. Her subjects are blurred, fragmented and intersecting with painterly forms. Limbs of the bodies are twisting, shifting through vague and impossible poses that dissolve and melt into each other. There’s a lasting ambiguity the viewer explores across the surfaces of the canvases.

 

With titles such as Yer tha Sun in My Mourning Babe and A Shadow of Whut I Once Was, the paintings are underscored with cultural vernacular, connecting the abstracted works to notions of identity. Quarles herself has a racial identity more ambiguous than surface appearances.

 

For her paintings, the shifting ambiguity of the figures frees them from objectified definition. They are liminal bodies – betwixt and between states.