In L.A., Christina Quarles Confronts the Tension Between Body, Space and Identity

Christina Quarles depicting contorted human forms. The figures are intertwined, with elements of abstraction and overlapping spaces, creating a sense of fluidity, tension, and transformation." width="970" height="728" data-caption='Christina Quarles, <em>Tomb (Is My World Not Fallin&#8217; Down?)</em>, 2025. <span class="media-credit">© Christina Quarles Courtesy the artist, Hauser &amp; Wirth and Pilar Corrias, London Photo: Fredrik Nilsen</span>'>

Fresh from Yale, Christina Quarles quickly ascended to the upper ranks of contemporary art, with strong market demand for her work and significant institutional recognition. She has established herself internationally with her painterly investigation of a more fluid conception and expression of the body, not only through the politics of gender and identity—she is a queer, mixed-race woman—but also through the broader technological forces that have progressively eroded any coherent sense of presence within a single, unified space.

Her fluid, interlocking human figures defy not only conventional anatomy but also any sense of scale and perspective, engaging with ambiguity: identities resist categorization, bodies resist traditional shapes and spaces collapse or expand unpredictably. At the heart of her work is a profound sense of instability, ambiguity and fluidity that characterizes contemporary human existence—figures caught in the timeless negotiation between the inner and the external worlds. A more dramatic instability seems to permeate the theatrically distorted and contracted figures that inhabit her latest body of work, currently on view at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles, which is informed by the profound displacement Quarles has experienced in recent years and is processing and recording through these paintings.

“I try to stay very present in the moment when creating a body of work. This naturally brings in everything that has come before and up to the present moment,” Quarles told Observer just after the opening. Inevitably, past experiences inform her painting gestures, even when they do not directly illustrate specific events. The works currently on show were created following a period of significant personal upheaval, including her family’s displacement after two fires—one in 2024 and another eight months later, the tragic Los Angeles wildfires in February 2025—which led to two years of temporary living arrangements. “We were already eight months into displacement, and then we continued to move from place to place every few weeks until June of last year. That’s when I really was able to start working in the studio again.”

Quarles has first-hand knowledge of the fragility of the human condition, as well as its ability to adapt. While her earlier work was heavily focused on the body’s relationship with others, in her latest works, the body takes on a secondary role, and she focuses on the sense of space and place the body can inhabit. “What’s been interesting to me is that the spaces have become much more articulated in paint,” she said, pointing out that even where raw canvas remains in her work, figures made of paint were bisected and interrupted by one or two pattern planes. Here, multiple pattern planes, environments and lighting conditions collapse into a single compressed dimension. “I think that, as the spaces became more articulated, they tipped into illegibility. These paintings aren’t minimal works by any means; everything’s thrown into them: every kind of pattern, texture and rendering style has been in my work. A single work feels like it’s almost two or three of my paintings collapsing in a single painting.”

The tension in her work primarily emerges from this convulsed amalgamation of bodies fighting to claim space. Their limbs cramp and crush against each other in an irreconcilable entanglement. “Painting is always a play between positive and negative space. Now, as environments have become denser, positive space allows moments of figuration to exist as negative space,” Quarles reflected, pointing to Feelin’ Fine (Push On Thru), where a figure is entirely raw canvas, including all the drips. “It’s about not being afraid of the blank space, but the negative space’s potential to inhabit. There’s potential and absence—that’s been running through my head a lot: this potentiality in absence, erasure, or omission.” That blank space—and the tension it creates with the frenetic accumulation of elements elsewhere—represents displacement and disorientation, symbolizing the impossibility of finding a space to fit and the need to resiliently adapt to what is left open.

Quarles’s work has always originated from an experimental accumulation of layers, not only of paint but also of silkscreens and printing materials, further complicating the legibility of the painting as a stable, one-dimensional image. That ambiguity is central to her exploration of the body. “This idea of ambiguity is often confused with being vague, like not having enough information, which makes you ambiguous,” Quarles explained. “To me, it’s the opposite. I think it’s when there’s too much information, and it starts to contradict itself, creating an excess.”

That reflection evoked the reality of existence today, in which our physical and psychological bodies are constantly exposed to an overload of inputs of all kinds, which then influence and shape their own presence and expression. What interests her is precisely how ambiguity is mapped onto the body.

In the exhibition, sensory overload and emotional bewilderment are translated through Quarles’s treatment of light: a kaleidoscopic maze of halos and projections evokes a sense of multiple realities. “I think of halos as radiating light or projections, like the body reflected,” she explained, pointing to Tomb (Is My World Not Fallin’ Down?), where this transforms into a mirage and illusion of a moon-like shape. “Light here is used to create deception, rather than clarity.” In other works, she includes a definitive circle representing sunlight. “You see simultaneous conditions of light, where it’s like, ‘Is it night or is it day?’ And that rupture of time is also defining the space in these works.”

In a further play with disorientation, Quarles’s largest piece in the show, the diptych Glow, After, can be interpreted in either orientation. It theatrically stages the tension between night and day and between the figures themselves—bodies that fight, throw themselves and grapple to stay on either side of reality. The spectrum of light breaks into a rainbow, interrupted by two specular arches. Many of her works share a circular development in their compositions, suggesting continuity. Yet they consistently turn into an unresolvable tension between the bodies, rejecting resolution and never closing the cycle. This is evident in Return to Oz, a smaller work in which bodies move in circular motion, seeming to find their final form but never fully uniting.

“The figure is always contending with the edge,” Quarles pointed out, acknowledging how the interplay between the frame and the figure drives the tension in her works. Bodies rarely exceed the frame, except when planes interrupt the figure. By contrast, the patterns act as stand-ins for infinity, since they can be repeated infinitely, just like the raw canvas, which becomes an infinite expanse. “I’m always testing how much the figure needs to bend and contort itself in order to be whole within the frame.”

This is also related to Quarles’s direct, physical engagement with the canvas, as she stretches her body to fit or contend with its edges, moving across the surface. The scale of her marks is closely tied to her body, particularly her shoulders and armspan, though not in exact proportions. The rotations and arches of the figures are influenced by the physical limits of her own movements. For her, painting is an act of negotiation and an embodiment of movement through which the body channels the psyche’s imaginative and subconscious forces onto the canvas. “It’s a very embodied experience. I feel like my body is involved in finding the bodies within the work, negotiating with the canvas itself. It’s a negotiation between my physical mark-making ability, the stretch of my wingspan and the space on the canvas.”

While Quarles has a significant drawing practice, she does not use sketches or references when painting. Her work is about intuition and responding to the canvas in the moment, without pre-planning. If something interests her, she might consider incorporating it, but it is never a direct reference. “It’s really more about memory,” she said. “It’s a process of building, and it’s intuitive—one mark leads to the next until I find the figure.”

She also acknowledges that the moment of interruption—the rupture of instinctive, fluctuating mark-making—is essential, adding both a new temporality and dimensionality to the work. “I try to interrupt myself from completing a form, and I really look and see what’s happening,” she said, noting how sustained looking allows her to find biomorphic patterns in spontaneous abstraction.

It is in this moment of sustained observation that Quarles pushes her images to the next level of complexity by using technological tools to re-mediate and renegotiate her work by photographing her paintings, transferring them to Adobe Illustrator and digitally manipulating planes, patterns and textures. “The sketching process happens at that point,” she explained. “There might already be a lot of figures and paint on the canvas, and then I bring it into the computer and play around with all the different planes, patterns and textures. Different things can exist at a scale that’s not a one-to-one with my own body because Adobe Illustrator is so scalable.”

This continuous confrontation between the potentially infinite digital space and the physical constraints makes Quarles’s work all the more timely. She engages with a virtual space that is both a grid and a data conglomerate—potentially infinite yet visualized within the confines of the screen—opening reflections on expanding the notion of self beyond the physical body. “I think that even before technology, we’ve had a concept of self that taps into something that is not just physically bound—into the infinite, the spiritual,” she reflected. “Then technology allowed us to access dimensions that clearly exceed the possibilities of our individual bodies.”

In her process, she explores a fundamental tension defining contemporary existence exacerbated by technology, yet rooted in deeper historical contexts, like the Cartesian split between body and mind, physical and spiritual, material and imaginative. This division has shaped Western thought for centuries and continues to resonate today in our relationships with our environments and inner realms.

Quarles intentionally engages with glitches between these dimensions, playing with hallucinations and mirages in the liminal space between the physical and the imagined, and a tension arises from the impossibility of reconciling these realms. “There’s zero translation between the digital mark and the eventual stencil,” she said. This friction between digital and physical spaces is mapped onto the canvas, where Quarles negotiates the infinite potential of the digital world with the constraints of the physical. “The computer is funny because I’ll work on something on my laptop, and it’s so tiny. Then, when I print it out, it’s different in the physical space. It’s always unexpected, and that’s where I go back and make adjustments.”

Once the stencil is applied, it often pushes Quarles to go beyond what her body would naturally do, creating an artificial shape. She then works with thick, tactile layers of paint, favoring a direct engagement with the material over airbrush techniques, creating another layer of expansion, as the physical format extends infinitely through the imaginative and spontaneous forces of the psyche, liberated by the free-flowing painterly gesture. “It’s important to me that the understanding of inhabiting a body and inhabiting space takes into consideration that those bodies and spaces are often not in the physical realm,” she considered, adding that much of what we experience and interact with today—shaping our notions of reality and self—exists in the digital space.

She draws attention to how even our conversation, happening on Zoom, establishes a new relationship between bodies—both in their physical and emotional expressions, perceptions and representations. “When I first started thinking about my work 10 years ago, something I talked a lot about was how we interact with people, seeing them as whole beings. But when we interact with ourselves, we can only really see our hands, feet and limbs. We can’t see our face when interacting with someone, even though the face is often the most important thing,” she said. “After the pandemic, that statement no longer holds true, because now most of our interactions are like this, where we’re interacting with faces but can’t see the whole body. It’s a whole different way of interacting with our own bodies now, even in the last 10 years. I think it’s important to acknowledge how things have changed and shifted over time.”

She also pointed to the significant role of the digital realm, and particularly social media, in how we present ourselves. “You can edit your image, whether through filters or cosmetic surgery, and you have a lot of control over how people see you. You can even put your pronouns in your Zoom handle or on Instagram, self-narrating who you are before anyone else has the chance to guess. Much of my work has been about the legibility of self to others, and we’re entering an interesting moment where we’re the authors of our own terms. But I’m not sure if we’re necessarily the best authors of ourselves.” There are inherent biases in our self-perception, despite the illusion of control.

Still, Quarles believes that there is something deeply valuable in the negotiation of self-assertion—the same exercise that her figures engage with. She actively incorporates this process of self-definition, inhabiting the tension between the physical and psychical, the real and the imaginary, into her work—both in the act of creating and in how she hopes viewers will engage with the finished pieces.

“That’s something I try to keep active in my work, in the process of making it, and hopefully in the process of looking at it,” Quarles said. “It’s this ongoing negotiation with a set of limits.” The inventiveness in her work specifically arises from these limitations, whether imposed by the frame, the paint or her own body. “There’s this idea that a limitation placed on us is only oppressive, or only used to subjugate. But I think there’s also a lot of potential for agency, creativity, and empowerment that comes from those limits. Having a limit is actually something you can push against and use as a tool. That’s something I try to do.”

It is within these limits, and the apparent illegibility they produce, that Quarles’s work finds its semiotic and anthropological relevance. Her paintings are not immediately understandable but rather unfold over time through the complex weaving of different dimensions of reality and perception, forcing the viewer to confront them. “I hope for a process of sustained looking, a part that can hopefully be turned into a space for asking questions, rather than trying to rest on a definitive conclusion,” she said. The illusory promise of figuration or vibrant colors and patterns may draw viewers in, creating a sense of familiarity. But this is inevitably rejected by the inability to find a clear picture. “Ambiguity is essential—it stretches the message forward.”

Nonetheless, she acknowledges that it is human instinct to seek meaning, evident in how we engage with art as much as in how we navigate social interactions, and continuously adjust our identities to fit within social contexts, seeking recognition and shared understanding. “I think right now, everyone is reaching this crisis moment where it just feels like you could pick any subject—whether it’s the environment or migration, or health and disease, or war, borders, governments—everything is falling apart. I think we’re all these bodies I’m portraying in my works. We have this idea of ourselves and our lifespan that exists within that framework, and it’s falling apart. We are struggling to still fit within it. My work is about confronting all those tensions we are experiencing.”

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