CHRISTINA QUARLES: AMERICAN STAR ARTIST FOCUSES ON IDENTITY AND THE BODY IN HER FIRST SOLO EXHIBITION IN THE NORDICS

Image credit: Ilona Szwarc
With permission from Christina Quarles, Pilar Corrias London and Hauser & Wirth

Starting June 7th, Gammel Strand will showcase the exhibition ‘In the Shadow of Burning Light’ by American artist Christina Quarles. This exhibition, the artist’s first in the Nordics, presents 30 works, alongside a spatial intervention. In recent years, the artist has established herself as a significant voice on the international art scene, engaging in the current debate on identity and representation with works that revolve around the experience of living within a racialized gendered body. The artist will inaugurate the exhibition on June 6th.

Christina Quarles’ first solo exhibition in the Nordics at Gammel Strand will feature a series of deeply personal works, exploring the imagined and prescribed boundaries of identity.

As a queer cis-gendered woman, born to a black father and a white mother, Quarles investigates the body as a container that holds multiple selves. Quarles’ figures and the planes in which they are situated and dislocated, explore this idea of multiplicity–understanding the self in all its complexity, while often being misread. Quarles oscillates between abstraction and representation, stretching and condensing her ambiguous figures, across patterns and architectural environments, as a way of challenging ingrained instincts around classifying what we see, be it a work of art, or another person.

Complex Compositions Centered on the Body
‘In the Shadow of Burning Light’ features a wide range of paintings, drawings, and works on paper, displayed in an exhibition design, created by Quarles for Gammel Strand. Here the artist uses custom-designed wallpaper and painted backdrops reflecting the settings surrounding the figures in her work.

Quarles works with complex visual compositions where the human body is the omnipresent focal point. With impressive technical prowess, hybrid-like figures merge and intertwine in a persistent attempt to understand how identity is continuously constructed and renegotiated depending on social context.

Quarles’ paintings and drawings display a unique approach to figuration and representation. Her paintings portray figures more as an analogy than a representational body. Using psychedelic colors, dense patterns, and what she calls an “excess of gender” Quarles works to depict the enigmatic experience of living within one’s own body: Instead of depicting how the body appears, I hope to create images that explore how the complex, bodily experience feels,” says Quarles.

An Important Contribution to Our Time
Christina Quarles works across media, with a combination of painting and graphics, transferring patterns created in digital formats to painting, as well as incorporating words and language into her drawings. The titles of her pieces are often derived from pop songs, poems, or overheard conversations. They are rarely literal, using humor or punning to play on our tendency to draw hasty conclusions.

Nanna Hjortenberg, Director of Gammel Strand, states:
"Christina Quarles has, in just a few years, created a significant and original body of work that is simultaneously deeply personal and highly relevant. In Quarles' work, one must search long for a definitive answer, and she manages, like few others, to capture how identity is continuously formed in interaction with our surroundings. Her work is an important contribution to our time and to the understanding of what identity is. This makes her an ideal choice for Gammel Strand, where we aim to showcase contemporary art that enlightens us on the questions and debates that shape our era.”

Bio
Christina Quarles (b. 1985) lives and works in Los Angeles. She holds an MFA from Yale School of Art (2016). Quarles has had numerous solo exhibitions and played a central role in the critically acclaimed exhibition The Milk of Dreams at the Venice Biennale in 2022. Among her recent solo exhibitions are Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2023), MCA Chicago, Chicago (2021), and South London Gallery, London (2021). She is also represented in the collection at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.

About ‘In the Shadow of Burning Light’
‘In the Shadow of Burning Light’ spans two floors and features paintings, drawings, and scenographic elements developed by Christina Quarles for Gammel Strand.

Program
On June 6th, there will be an exhibition opening and preview with Christina Quarles.
The exhibition will be open from June 7th to September 8th.

International Media on Christina Quarles
Christina Quarles has been well-received by the international press. The New York Times writes: “It’s this tension between the digital and the analogue, the way her figures oscillate between ecstasy and pain, confinement and freedom that gives her work its power.

Wallpaper shares the enthusiasm, writing: “All eyes on Christina Quarles, the painter inventing a new figurative language.”

Art in America states: “As with all of Quarles’s work, the longer you look, the more complex and ambivalent the image becomes. These are not, or not only, scenes of intimacy or self-examination: they also contain shades of violence, revulsion, and self-doubt.”

Thanks to
The City of Copenhagen, Augustinus Fonden, Det Obelske Familiefond, Beckett Fonden, Knud Højgaards Fond, Statens Kunstfond, Arne v. Schleschs Fond, Louis Hansen Fonden, Pilar Corrias, Hauser & Wirth, and Louisiana Channel.

Learn more about ‘In the Shadow of Burning Light’ at Gammel Strand.

Best regards
HAVE Communications

For additional information, please contact:
Louise Thuesen / louise@have.dk / (+45) 2265 5204
Caroline Victoria Ulrich / caroline@have.dk / (+45) 4222 8858