Art & artists >

Christina Quarles

19 October 2019 - 19 January 2020

The Hepworth Wakefield will present the first solo exhibition in a European museum by American artist Christina Quarles (b.1985)

Quarles’ vibrantly coloured and textured paintings depict bodies that barely seem contained by the frame of the canvas. Body parts appear in varying states of abstraction, framed by architectural devices that create ever-shifting spaces.

On display will be a range of recent paintings and drawings including a number of new works created specifically for this exhibition.

The ways in which her painted bodies elude definition reflects her own experience of being misread or mis-represented, as a queer cis woman, born to a black father and white mother.

Occasional fragments of text in earlier paintings and recent drawings reveal some of the literary, musical and autobiographical references that underpin her work. They also draw parallels with the use of textual fragments in the early paintings of David Hockney, displayed in the concurrent exhibition, Alan Davie & David Hockney: Early Works.