“For Quarles, identity is three-dimensional, comprising what is seen, heard, and felt. Often in her paintings a mess of limbs, torsos, breasts, and buttocks meld and morph into and around each other, resulting in the feeling of stumbling upon someone’s private moments. Growing up as a multi-racial person, Quarles often struggled to reconcile her racial self-identity with the assumptions about her race that people imposed on her, an experience that she has also felt when people learned that she is queer.”
A triad of androgynous bodies converges and convulses in Christina Quarles’s Bits n’ Pieces from 2019, a mesmerizing painting of sensuous ambiguity that reveals itself, as the title suggests, body part by body part. As they unravel from intersecting layers of purple checkerboard and red-yellow plaid patterns, Quarles’s Dionysian figures here visualize a radical fragmentation of corporeal form, at once expressing the inner complexities of identity and countering fixed identifications of race, gender, and sexuality. Bits n’ Pieces typifies the relentless curiosity and innovative technique that has propelled Quarles’ practice to critical acclaim, leading her to a prominent solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in 2021 inclusion in the prestigious Central Pavilion curated by Cecilia Alemani at the 2022 Venice Biennale, and most recently, her first major New York gallery show at Hauser & Wirth in September 2022. A standout painting from Quarles’s first solo exhibition in China from 2019 to 2020, Every Silver Lining Has Its cloud at Pond Society, Shanghai, Bits n’ Pieces sees the artist’s distinctive forms dissolve and evolve with the viewer’s eye to encapsulate the psychosomatic paradoxes of human identity.
In Bits n’ Pieces, amorphous, phantasmagoric silhouettes bear down on the forefront figure as they lurch towards a sunflower, which seems to surrender to the combined weight of the bodies, its verdant green stem wilting in a parabolic inflection downward. As if grappling with the primal cognitive awareness of their own own physical existence, the figures in Bits n’ Pieces here contort in writhing gestures and serpentine configurations that recall ancient depictions of the human body in agony, such as in the iconic Hellenistic sculpture Laocoön and His Sons. The present work additionally invokes the surrealistic linework of Salvador Dali, the delicate anthropomorphism of Georgia O’Keefe, and in particular, the corporeal sculpture of Louise Bourgeois, whose intensely psychological abstraction of the human form finds resonance in Quarles’s own belief in the fragmented body-in-pieces as the essential disposition of the postmodern somatic experience.
Christina Quarles’s distinctive feel for the visceral strangeness of physical experience manifests in a visual lexicon and creative methodology of her own, which deftly hybridize physical and digital space. In line with the most consummate examples of the artist’s abstract figuration, Bits n’ Pieces sees her stratify the material terrain of the canvas into digitally drafted planes of patterned wallpaper that is transposed with the motley contours of heads, limbs, breasts, and buttocks. Beginning her process with primordial line drawings of manifold human forms, Quarles continues to paint digitally rendered backgrounds to create illusionistic environments surrounding her figures with the guide of stencils or vinyl plotters. Entrancing yet disorienting, the resulting intersection of color, texture, and form gives shape to figures contoured by sharp markings and washy, diaphanous brushstrokes, abstracted to their bare parts to expose the nuances of bodies. Broken down and anonymous, Quarles’s corporeal figures thus deny classifications of gender, race, and sexuality as they navigate between virtual and physical realms, imparting profound insight into the complexities of what it can feel to inhabit a human body in the twenty -first century.
"What interests me are themes of the sort of fragmentation that happens of yourself when you are in your body and really at a disadvantage in the way of knowing yourself because you know all [your] contradictions, all the ways you exceed or don't quite fit into these certain categories of identity that we're placed in."
As the viewer of the present work follows each straining palm and outstretched appendage to the next, Bits n’ Pieces confronts one with a disjunct experience of human embodiment, revealing the triumphant apogee of Quarles’s painterly dexterity and innovation. Quarles, who identifies as a bi-racial and queer cis-woman, explains, "what interests me are themes of the sort of fragmentation that happens of yourself when you are in your body and really at a disadvantage in the way of knowing yourself because you know all [your] contradictions, all the ways you exceed or don't quite fit into these certain categories of identity that we're placed in. And yet we experience a world of other people where [they are] these cohesive figures." (Christina Quarles quoted in: Claire Selvin "Christina Quarles on the Intricacies of Figuration and Selfhood" ARTNews, 15 April 2021 (online)) Simultaneously connected and torn apart in an ambiguous emotional mixture of passion and agony, the figures that inhabit the present work perfectly realize the metamorphoses of the body in which the artist discovers visual parallel to this experience of inner questioning and turmoil.
