Christina Quarles Finds Freedom in Confinement at Hamburger Bahnhof

“Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” It’s one of the most quoted lines of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, and a sentiment that artist Christina Quarles riffs on in her work. As she explained at the opening of “Collapsed Time,” her first institutional solo exhibition in Germany, she’s “interested in the experience of living within your own body instead of the experience of looking at a body.”

The exhibition, now on view at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof through September 17th, also features the works of seven artists, such as Daniel Buren and Charlotte Posenenske, from the collection of the nearby Nationalgalerie, personally selected by Quarles. These artists’ graphic elements and depictions of confinement gain renewed meaning offset by Quarles’s own works.

“Figure drawing is this weird thing where you can’t just acquire the skill and be done with it,” Quarles explained. “It’s like working out at the gym, you have to keep maintaining it. When I go to the painting, I’m not referring to sketches. I’m referring to this ongoing practice of drawing.”

Figures, erm, figure heavily in “Collapsed Time.” Nudes contort themselves to fit within the confines of the canvas, and the tension is palpable. It’s not, however, the tension of a woman being watched. In fact, as Quarles wrote in the accompanying publication for “Collapsed Time,” while her figures are often gendered as women by observers, “there’s many aspects of the figure that are more androgynous.” These bodies resist the confines of specificity and identity. In Bless tha Nightn’gale (2019), an Egon Schiele–like tangle of bodies reveals breasts, long hair, and at times feminine facial features. But that face is one of three possible faces lurking in one form. Meanwhile, a figure on the left-hand side of the canvas is stripped so bare that the decisive, wide yet simple brushstrokes suggest that all that remains of the person presented is skeletal muscle.

These specific ambiguities are one way that Quarles brings her own body into her work. She can recall countless playground conversations as a child, being asked by her classmates: “What are you?” The fairness of her skin meant that she often passed as white, leaving her young peers in disbelief when she explained that her mother is white and her father is Black. “It sort of opened up this possibility for me that one’s internal self-understanding could be contradictory to how you’re read or interpreted by other people,” she said in an interview with the exhibition’s co-curator, Sam Baradouil. For Quarles, applying that contradiction to the canvas or drawing paper is liberating.

The minute details of her identity as a queer, cisgender, biracial woman translate into figures that are hard to pin down as fixed marks. In the same way that Quarles describes coming out as a continual process (like figure drawing, it’s not an event that’s attained once and then marked complete), her subjects are constantly asserting and reasserting themselves in different states of definition, at once familiar and disorienting. It’s the impulsively surreal illustration style of Ren & Stimpy’s John Kricfalusi, tempered with a more inviting, at times Lisa Frank–ish color palette.