ART IN MENORCA
32
JULY 2023
SUMMER EXHIBITION AT HAUSER & WIRTH, ISLA DEL REY 17 JUNE – 29 OCTOBER
CHRISTINA QUARLES ‘COME IN FROM AN ENDLESS PLACE’ Los Angeles-based artist Christina Quarles visited Menorca to unveil her new Exhibition at the Hauser & Wirth Art Gallery on Isla del Rey. This is her first exhibition in Spain, coinciding with a major presentation at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin and follows her participation in last year’s celebrated exhibition ‘The Milk of Dreams’ at the Venice Biennale. On display are her paintings on canvas and paper and her drawings, all produced especially for the exhibition. Christina visited Menorca last summer. She was fascinated by the history, texture and shadows on the walls in the gallery and intrigued by the meditative experience of arriving at the island by boat. She took into consideration these surroundings when creating her critically acclaimed pieces. At the Press launch Christina explained how the paintings display fragmented, polymorphous bodies embedded in rich, textural patterns and her fascination with the subject of bodily experience. Tangled arms and legs transform across her paintings (often too many for the bodies), while perspectival planes bisect bodies, simultaneously grounding and dislocating them in space. She explained that as individuals we can only see our own arms and legs and not our own faces and so our limbs give us a unique perspective of our own bodies. Quarles begins by making initial sweeping marks on the canvas that then evolve into line drawings of human forms and body parts. A graphic artist for many years, she then photographs the work and uses Adobe Illustrator to draw the backgrounds and structures that ultimately surround the figures. As a queer, cis-gendered woman born to a black father and a white mother, Quarles has described her position of engagement with the world as ‘multiply situated,’ an experience of embodiment reflected in her art. When she told school friends she had a black father they would not believe her and she felt the struggle to project her own identity. Her figures question the boundaries of identity. Vibrant magentas, blues, greens, and yellows serve not as a means of describing reality but as a way of actively resisting the viewer’s instinct to assign binary classifications to the figures such as male or female, white or Black, abstract or representational. In addition to the paintings, ‘Come In From An Endless Place’ features Quarles’ fine-line drawings, where figures are often accompanied by phrases written into the composition, evoking the artists’interest in language’s potential to create and disrupt meaning. The sentences, written in a mixture of slang and phonetic D O N ’ T M I S S A N E D I T I O N , S U B S C R I B E T O D AY ! V I S I T: R O Q U E TA M A G A Z I N E . N E T
