Christina Quarles

In her expressive, technically complex paintings, Christina Quarles strives for what she describes as ‘the experience of living in a body rather than looking at a body’. Formal devices such as stencilled areas of pattern offer a scaffold for figures that stretch and contort around and through the picture plane; the dynamics of their interrelation are left open to the viewer’s interpretation. Quarles’ interest in indeterminacy comes from her lived experience as a queer cis multiracial woman who is often presumed to be white. I’d a Scope Eyes features a pair of figures in a horizontal arrangement. Long limbs reach, kick, pull and caress, while the two bodies are linked across zones of time and space by sweeping red-brushed gestures. A monumental yellow flower with a needle-sharp stem stands on the left of the unprimed canvas, conveying a mix of joy and threat.