For Sorrow or Inspiration

Four figures are held together in what seems to be a cylinder of light in some sort of surreal landscape. The figures’ contours follow the edges of the painting closely, in the same way as the self is encased within the boundaries of the body. Instead of looking at the body from the outside, Christina Quarles’s painting explores what it means to move within a body marked by skin colour, gender and sexual identity. Her point of departure is her own experience of being a queer, light-skinned woman with a white and a Black parent in present-day America. Her motifs are often painted in colours such as fuchsia and violet, colours that express a sense of warmth or outer or inner pressure rather than reproducing the actual skin colour of the figures.