#RecentAcquisition ✨Christina Quarles’ “Ascent” (2021) explores the artist's own personal experience of human physiology and expression. Quarles seeks to create dialogue between art and society to explore the ways race, gender, and sexuality intersect to form complex identities. Quarles’ (b.1985, Chicago) paintings serve as a gateway to explore what it means to be human and know oneself. Each work teems with contorted limbs, torsos, and faces with vivid and enigmatic expressions, reconfigured into new forms. The figures often collide and merge with familiar domestic objects made strange through the artist’s color choices and gestural brushstrokes. “The figures in my work are possibly individual bodies moving through time and space as well as through their perception of themselves. They also interact with their shadows. I use the medium of painting, with its historical connotations, to activate something that can go beyond fixity... It is less important for me to describe race with skin pigmentation because that doesn’t sum up my individual experience, and it’s much more relevant to explain my experience of race through these boundaries, edges, and moments of fragmentation that can also dislocate the body.” — @cequarles Does “Ascent” challenge your notion of identity and expression? _______ (1) Christina Quarles, “Ascent,” 2021. Acrylic on canvas. Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. Museum purchase with funds provided by Kevie Yang Photo by Fredrik Nilsen. (2) Artist portrait. Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London. Photo: Ilona Szwar