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Christina Quarles – Living in the Wake opened at Kistefos
Christina Quarles – Living in the Wake
Solo Exhibition at Kistefos
4 May – 12 October 2025
The Twist, Kistefos Museum
For the 2025 season, Kistefos is proud to present Living in the Wake, the first major solo exhibition in Norway by acclaimed American artist Christina Quarles (b. 1985). Staged within the architectural landmark The Twist, the exhibition offers a comprehensive survey of Quarles’ work and includes two entirely new paintings created specifically for the show.
Quarles is widely celebrated for her fluid, dynamic figuration that grapples with the instability of identity and the complexity of embodiment. Her work challenges the boundaries of legibility and representation, creating spaces where the self can be fragmented, overlapping, and constantly remade. As the artist notes, “There’s these larger overarching narratives of the work about what it is to be in a body, what it is to move through the world in a body, what it is to contend with wanting to have people be able to immediately read you, but then having parts of yourself that contradict that legibility or undermine that experience.”
Living in the Wake unfolds across the full span of The Twist, guiding visitors through a series of thematically arranged galleries that examine Quarles’ evolving visual and conceptual language. The exhibition includes 23 works, spanning new and recent paintings, selected loans from institutions and private collections, and four significant works from the Christen Sveaas Art Foundation and Art Collection.
Key themes include:
- Identity and Intersectionality, reflecting Quarles’ perspective as a queer, multiracial woman and how her art destabilizes fixed notions of race, gender, and sexuality.
- The Body as a Landscape, where contorted and layered figures reimagine the human form as mutable terrain—challenging traditional depictions of identity and intimacy.
- Architectonic Anatomy, which explores the interplay between the body and the built environment, suggesting that identity is shaped not only by internal experience but also by physical space and social context.
In a significant architectural intervention, Quarles has designed a series of temporary walls and spatial structures throughout the gallery, introducing new rhythms and sightlines within The Twist. These interventions foster dynamic dialogues between the paintings, the gallery’s twisting form, and the landscape beyond. By reframing the way viewers move through the space, the structures heighten the embodied experience of the exhibition—encouraging a physical negotiation of shifting perspectives that mirrors the conceptual undercurrents of her work.
With Living in the Wake, Christina Quarles invites us to confront the complexity of living in a body that resists easy definitions. This landmark presentation affirms Quarles as one of the most vital voices in contemporary art today and marks a bold new chapter for Kistefos’ annual programming.
Living in the Wake is curated by Kate Smith.
Notes to Editors
About Christina Quarles
Christina Quarles was born in 1985 in Chicago and lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her MFA from Yale School of Art in 2016. Quarles’ highly distinctive paintings combine figuration with abstraction to explore identity, queerness, race, and the experience of being in a body. Her work has been widely exhibited internationally, with recent solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2023); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2023); and South London Gallery (2021). She was featured in the 2022 Venice Biennale and her work is held in the permanent collections of institutions including The Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate, and LACMA.
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Kistefos was established in 1996 by Norwegian businessman and art collector Christen Sveaas on the former site of his grandfather’s pulp mill. Today, Kistefos offers world-class architecture, industrial history, art exhibitions, and an expansive sculpture park in scenic surroundings. Every year, Kistefos presents new art exhibitions by highly recognized national and international artists in its two galleries, The Twist and Nybruket Gallery. The Twist has won several prizes for its cutting-edge design and is a gallery, a bridge, and a sculpture, all in one.
