Christina Quarles has a way of stretching paint to its limits. Biracial and queer, she gives her images of bodies an elasticity and fluidity that is stunning. At the same time, she explores the plasticity of acrylic paint, layered on the canvas like a second skin or applied over digitally generated stencils to look like large stickers—hence there is much talk about her work as collage, even when her medium is solely acrylic.
Quarles has explored the power and vulnerability of the self in this way since earning her Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University in 2016. But her new work, made after the Eaton fire decimated her Altadena community last year, seems even more “untethered”, as she says. Another word for it is wild, as visitors can see in The Ground Glows Black, her first solo exhibition with Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles.
Quarles’s Fuck This Muck (Yer Bringin’ Me Down) (2025), which the artist describes as “just being kind of stuck in the muck”
© Christina Quarles; Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Pilar Corrias, London; Photo: Fredrik Nilsen
The Art Newspaper: One of your new paintings is titled Fuck this Muck (Yer Bringin’ Me Down), perfect for this political moment, or this past year of “fire and ice” (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) in Los Angeles.
Christina Quarles: I rarely use curse words in my titles, but it was what I was feeling. In all my titles, I try to reference my state of mind when I’m making the work or something I’ve been listening to, a way of anchoring that moment in time. For that one, I was painting this mucky, swampy leg emerging from the ground. It’s this feeling of being brought down: every time you try to get up, just being kind of stuck in the muck.
You are also creating the impression of these deep spaces in the new canvases, like wormholes or wombs to climb inside.
I love the read of them being these sort of portals or wombs. I see them as instances of ambient light, like moonlight or streetlight. I’ve been really interested in monochromatic, light like a sodium-vapour lamp—these instances where light actually removes colour and strips away a colour spectrum while illuminating a space.
What are sodium-vapour lights usually used for?
I actually think I’m going to bring them into the show in one area. They used to be used in streetlights, those yellowy streetlights that were everywhere before LEDs. The Exploratorium in San Francisco has this Monochromatic Room, where a rainbow-arc mural is exposed to sodium-vapour light and looks like all these sepias and greys. I’ve been really interested in this, I think in response to what my entire world looked like after the Eaton fire, just this stripping of colour.
How awful—losing your home in the fire.
We’d actually had a house fire the year prior, so the Eaton fire burned down the Airbnb we were staying at and the house we were rebuilding. It’s been an interesting sort of doubling of grief.
Quarles’s Is This The Return to Oz? (2025)
© Christina Quarles; Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Pilar Corrias, London; Photo: Fredrik Nilsen
So your daughter, who is four years old, has been through two fires?
My friend was so sad, because she had bought our daughter a replacement trampoline after the first fire and then it burned down in the second fire. She’s like: “How many little trampolines does this child need to have in
her life?”
Do you think motherhood is showing up in your work in any visible or appreciable way?
The works on paper I’m doing arose from the different relationship to time you have as a parent, when you no longer have access to these long stretches of uninterrupted time. My wife might be doing pick-up, but I’m still thinking about being home for bath time. The works on paper are a way for me to speed up the complex set of emotions that happen when I make a painting.
Are these works paint on paper?
Typically, yes. But for this show, I was interested in working with charcoal, which has obvious connections to the post-fire experience that I’m living in. I always hated charcoal, because it’s so messy and has this nail-on-chalkboard sensation. It gives me the icks, because it’s so dry. So I’ve been experimenting with how to work with charcoal in a way that is more in conversation with paint, using powdered charcoal and a brush and water. It’s fascinating, because charcoal has this narrow reach for how much you can build up and take away. It’s about building an image through removal, through erasing. I’ve even been cutting into the paper and then tearing it away, like reverse collaging, to give clarity to the work.
Some of your new paintings are so dense with these tangles of limbs.
My paintings are always really kitchen sink, everything’s thrown into them. But I think that these latest works are like two or three of my paintings jammed together. There’s a dysregulation having so much of my sense of home and place and community just continually uprooted. Concurrently, we’re living in a time when historically and culturally things feel very untethered. My work was already dealing with multiplicity and ambiguity—now it’s like that is being thrown into a fun-house mirror.
- Christina Quarles: The Ground Glows Black, Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles, until 3 May
