Christina Quarles

For more than a decade, LA-based painter Christina Quarles (born 1985) has created figural abstractions that are at once confined within the limits of the canvas yet defy the boundaries that contain them. This has been the artist’s way of reflecting on what she refers to as “the experience of living in a gendered, racialized body.” Collapsed Time introduces Quarles’ work and situates it within a broader art historical context. Several of Quarles’ paintings and drawings, including a site-specific, large-scale painting, are placed within an architectural installation conceived for the exhibition. The works are staged in dialogue with a selection from the National Gallery’s collection by artists such as Vito Acconci, Nam June Paik and Charlotte Posenenske.

Los Angeles–based artist Christina Quarles (born 1985) paints bodies that are subjected not only to the weight and gravity of the physical world but also to the pleasures and pressures of the social realm. Her work explores the universal experience of existing within a body, as well as the ways race, gender and sexuality intersect to form complex identities. Quarles, whose art is often considered in relation to her identity as a queer, cisgender woman of mixed race, is among the vanguard of artists who are upending the white-male-dominated art scene. This book features paintings and drawings from throughout Quarles’ career. Working mostly in acrylic, Quarles populates her canvases with polymorphous figures that reference her background in life drawing, but with an expressionist spin all her own. Her figures’ disconnected arms and legs break through a surface punctuated with bold patterns, textures and staccato markings.