CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/16/2021

The first substantial monograph on rising painter Christina Quarles

“Pour Over” (2019) is reproduced from Christina Quarles, published to accompany the exhibition currently on view at MCA Chicago. “Refusing to yield to tacit racial and gender epistemologies or taut ontological constructs, the bodily morphologies inherent in Christina Quarles’s paintings exert agile postures that defy the representational limits designed to contain them,” Uri McMillan writes. “Her painterly tableaux exhort us, in other words, to witness the profound potentiality of the polymorphous bodies straining at the edges of the frame, to see in that effort a freedom of representation. Fantastically excessive and radically abstract, gesticulating to their own internal rhythms, they occasion us to ask: What if we, too, were to embrace the full range of our contradictions, existing in perpetual flux and unapologetic multiplicity rather than in the fiction of singularity?”

ABOVE: Christina Quarles, “Pour Over,” 2019. Acrylic on canvas. 60 x 48 x 1 1/2 in. (152.4 x 121.9 x 3.8 cm). © Christina Quarles, Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Pilar Corrias Gallery, London.