Christina Quarles

CHRISTINA QUARLES
Born in Chicago in 1985

Kicking n’ Screaming
2022
Acrylic paint and gel, and crayon on canvas
218.4 x 330.2 cm

Purchase, through the generosity of the International Friends of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the support of Allison Berg as well as Xu & Huang Family Charitable Foundation

The work of Christina Quarles is characterized by an advanced exploration of the human body, in which the tangle of limbs serves as the point of departure for several reflections on the corporeal experience. In her compositions that lie somewhere between figuration and abstraction, we often see figures endowed with additional limbs, who seem to fight against the limits of their own bodies, the environment in which they find themselves or even the confines of the work itself.

Kicking n’ Screaming is the first work by the artist to be added to the collection of a public institution in Canada. It is one of the works in a series of six that came out of a residency Quarles did in the English countryside, in Somerset.

With its rich colours and textures, this large-scale painting almost resembles a sculpture as much as it does a traditional painting.It contains the motifs we have come to expect from Quarles: elongated and tentacular figures moving in a strange universe, a kind of theatre. The composition emerges from a rich matte blue ground that evokes the influence of rural England on the artist’s palette.