In Residence: Christina Quarles

Hauser & Wirth Somerset is delighted to welcome Christina Quarles as artist-in-residence this summer.

Born in Chicago in 1985, Quarles has achieved wide acclaim for her exploration of bodily experience—from the weight and gravity of the physical world, to the pleasures and pressures of societal existence—in vivid, enigmatic paintings teeming with limbs, torsos, and faces reconfigured into new forms. Quarles’ work acts as a gateway to explore what it means to know oneself, she describes her work ‘as being portraits not of looking at a body, but portraits of being within your own body.’

Brought to life through painterly gestures and an unexpected palette, the artist’s scenes suggest the different ways in which race, gender, and sexuality contribute to the coalescing of identity. Quarles’ work spans drawing, painting, and installation, and embraces the permeability of the constructed form. As a queer, cis-woman born to a Black father and a white mother, she has described her position of engagement with the world as ‘multiply situated,’ an experience of embodiment reflected profoundly in her sui generis art.

Quarles has been the recipient of several awards and grants. She was the inaugural recipient of the 2019 Pérez Art Museum Miami Prize, in 2017 she received the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant, and in 2015 she received the Robert Schoelkopf Fellowship at Yale University. In addition, she participated in the Fountainhead Residency in 2017. Quarles’ work is currently featured in ‘The Milk of Dreams,’ the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, which opened to the public on the 23 April 2022 and runs throughout the summer.