Christina Quarles: Queer Bodies, Fluid Identity, and the New Language of Painting
Christina Quarles: Fluid Identity in Contemporary Painting
Christina Quarles (born 1985, Chicago) is a leading contemporary painter known for a charged, gestural language that tests how identity, gender, and queerness can be pictured without becoming fixed. Her paintings stage the body as a site of contradiction: intimate and public, readable and unstable, sensual and resistant.
Early life and influences
Quarles moved to Los Angeles with her mother after her parents’ divorce in 1991. An only child, she drew from an early age and took her first life drawing class at 12.
A key formative influence was her high school teacher Joseph Gatto, who stressed muscle memory and the fluid intelligence of the human form. Those early lessons return in her work as torsion, overlap, and bodies that refuse stable outlines.
Education and early career
Quarles attended the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, where she met her future spouse, Alyssa Polk. She earned a BA in art and philosophy from Hampshire College (2007) and an MFA in painting from Yale School of Art (2016). She also completed a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
Artistic style and themes
Quarles’ paintings are defined by abstract, energetic mark-making and distorted, intertwined figures that sit between figuration and collapse. The body becomes a problem to solve, not an image to consume.
Working from lived experience as a queer, mixed-race woman, she treats identity as something negotiated, not declared. Gender reads as motion. Anatomy reads as pressure. The figure becomes a place where social expectations, desire, and self-perception collide.
Major works and exhibitions
- Held Fast and Let Go Likewise (2020), shown at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, intensifies her central question: how many “selves” can a body contain before representation breaks.
- It’s Gunna Be All Right, Cause Baby, There Ain’t Nuthin Left (2017), her first solo show at Skibum MacArthur in Los Angeles, marked a sharp rise in visibility.
- Baby, I Want Yew To Know All Tha Folks I Am (2018), David Castillo Gallery, Miami, further established her as a significant painter of the present tense.
She has also appeared in major group contexts including Fictions (Studio Museum in Harlem), Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon (New Museum, New York), and Made in L.A. (Hammer Museum, Los Angeles).
Recognition and impact
Quarles’ work has earned critical acclaim and institutional support, including the Robert Schoelkopf Fellowship (Yale, 2015), the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant (2016), the Artsy Vanguard recognition (2018), and the inaugural Pérez Prize (Pérez Art Museum Miami, 2019).
Market visibility
Her market profile accelerated in 2022 when Night Fell Upon Us Up On Us (2019) sold at Sotheby’s New York for $4.5 million (with fees), a public signal of how quickly her work moved from critical attention to high-demand scarcity.
Personal life and artistic philosophy
Quarles’ biography is not presented as an “explanation” of the work, but as its pressure system. She uses painting, with all its historical baggage, to activate bodies that do not settle into a single reading.
“The figures in my work are possibly individual bodies moving through time and space as well as through their perception of themselves. They also interact with their shadows. I use the medium of painting, with its historical connotations, to activate something that can go beyond fixity.”
Future directions
Quarles continues to expand the problem of figuration: what it means to be seen, how it feels to be categorized, and how painting can hold contradiction without resolving it. Her strongest works do not “represent” identity. They make identity visible as friction.
