With music serving as a core point of inspiration for her work, the Frye Art Museum invited Los Angeles-based artist Christina Quarles to share a playlist in conjunction with her current exhibition, on view through June 5, 2022. You can find the playlist below, along with a discussion of the various ways Quarles brings musical influences into her practice.
Los Angeles-based artist Christina Quarles paints ambiguous figures who stretch, intertwine, and merge with their surroundings, their bodies subjected not only to the weight and gravity of the physical world but also to the pleasures and pressures of the social realm. She explores the universal experience of existing within a body, as well as the ways race, gender, and sexuality intersect to form complex identities. Unexpected color choices and experimental painterly gestures round out her evocative scenes. Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, this exhibition is the largest presentation of Quarles’s work to date.
In her work, Quarles also makes use of language to challenge meaning. For instance, some of her artwork titles featuring phonetic or alternate spelling of words, inviting the viewer into multiple readings of the word or phrase. For other works, borrowing from song titles or lyrics for titles adds yet another way to interpret them.
Note: Some of the music on this playlist contains explicit language.
Musical Inspiration
Below are some specific examples of works in the exhibition that highlight Quarles’s artistic connection to music.
Christina Quarles. Underneath It All, 2019. Acrylic on canvas. 72 x 60 x 2 in. Burger Collection, Hong Kong. © Christina Quarles. Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Pilar Corrias, London
Underneath It All (2019)
Song: “Underneath it All”
Artist: No Doubt
The rectangle at the center of this work is the result of a painting experiment. After building up dense layers of blue acrylic paint, Quarles decided to peel away the buildup, creating a translucent surface. This effect recalls the haze of Los Angeles smog and the way light reflects off the outline of mountains on the city’s outskirts. The figure appears to be somewhere between rest and action, pinned beneath the sky. The title, borrowed from a song by the band No Doubt, speaks to the painting process as well as the weight of the environment, which bisects the body in a way that, for the artist, recalled a guillotine.
Installation view of Christina Quarles, Frye Art Museum, Seattle, February 12–June 5, 2022. Photo: Jueqian Fang
Never Believe It’s Not So (Never Believe / It’s Not So) (2019)
Song: “Magic”
Artist: Pilot
In the middle of the exhibition’s largest gallery are three 12-foot tall free-standing panels covered with unstretched canvas. Named after the 1974 Pilot song lyric, “Never Believe It’s Not so (Never Believe / It’s Not So)” (2019), the installation lets us physically walk through the work.
As the work's title suggests, illusions are at play in this installation, which appears to be a wall covered in red-striped wallpaper with paintings hanging on it. This impression is undermined by the figures in each painting, whose limbs spill out of their frames. Other details, such as a note seemingly fixed to the wall with blue tape, play into the uncertainty. Quarles used the technique of trompe l’oeil, a traditional type of painting that uses light and shadow to trick the viewer into believing that the painting extends into real space. Quarles draws the viewer into a close engagement with the surface, challenging us to explore our own perceptions of illusion and reality in painting and in the world at large.