For Collapsed Time, her first solo exhibition in Germany, at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Christina Quarles has created a large-scale painting installation: Now We're There (And We' Only Just Begun), 2023....
For Collapsed Time, her first solo exhibition in Germany, at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Christina Quarles has created a large-scale painting installation: Now We're There (And We' Only Just Begun), 2023. In its initial configuration, the work is hung on a freestanding wall measuring 3.4 x 10 metres. Divided by two doorways, the wall serves as a passageway between galleries.
Composed of six individual canvas panels, measuring up to 4.9 metres high and 1.8 metres across, Now We're There (And We' Only Just Begun) is the largest of four painting installations Quarles has made since 2016.
Designed as an architectural intervention, this installation features striped patterns that correspond both to motifs seen throughout Quarles' practice and the work of other artists such as Daniel Buren and Annette Kelm, whose artworks have been specially selected from the Hamburger Bahnhof collection and included in the exhibition. The installation was devised in deliberate conversation with other historical artworks by Charlotte Posenenske, Nam June Paik, Absalon, Stanley Brouwn and Vito Acconci. These seemingly disparate pieces of art, which span several genres, all negotiate space and confinement, each with its own distinct physicality.
From the beginning of her career, Quarles has used figuration to explore and to upend the experience of living within a queer, gendered and racialized body. Her figures represent the experience of looking out into the world, moving through it, and butting up against freedom and restriction, based on the confines of identity.
In Now We're There (And We' Only Just Begun), Quarles’ signature figures are depicted within a trompe l'oeil canvas. The central depiction features a tangle of heads and torsos, which form in the upper right corner, transforming and trailing across a horizontally striped green-and-black plane. Hanging in negative space, the pattern sits below the horizon of a rising, or setting, sun. This scene cuts across three individual canvases, which is the first instance of Quarles segmenting an individual ‘painting’. She uses the installation and the architecture of the space and its doorways to exceed the limits of her medium with a work that moves beyond the edge of its canvas.
There is an intentional sense of misalignment here, and Quarles pushes her patterning further by overlaying her figures with another black-and-orange striped pattern that has an almost laminated texture. Quarles employs these multi-layered patterns as a means of reorienting her usual practice of working on discrete canvases, while also drawing her background into her foreground. These experiments allow Quarles to push the boundaries of her figuration, while also pushing literal boundaries. Whereas in past installations, Quarles used the illusion of a trompe l'oeil to allow her figures to exceed the canvas’s edge, this work redefines the physicality of the patterned wall.
On the centre left side of the installation, Quarles paints aphorisms and phrases, interspersing text with her vertically striped, orange pattern: The Story We Used to Tell, You N’ Me is Lucky to be Us, Deep in Dis Pear, Until Tha Nite Became Gray with Mornin, to name a few. As in her drawings and past installations, Quarles’ application of text is rooted in an embodied experience of language. Snippets she has overheard – in a song, in a book, in a joke, or in passing – are rendered phonetically.
Now We're There (And We' Only Just Begun), offers Quarles the opportunity to incorporate her interest in the lived experience of language – how it shifts and reshapes when reinterpreted by context, or by an individual – into her painting practice. Quarles’ installation demands something physical, as viewers must negotiate and share in an embodied experience, craning their necks or tilting their heads, to read the texts. The language and the visual vocabulary in Now We're There (And We' Only Just Begun) must be ‘read’ alongside one another. The patterns examine legibility – one must take time to take in the excess of information before interpreting the whole. These patterns, planes, figures and phrases can only be understood as a whole, through their complex interrelationships. In this way, Quarles inverts the act of reading a caption alongside an artwork. She challenges the oversimplification of something that is meant to be felt, and the impulse to understand a work of art all at once.
Together, all these motifs build a visual enigma for the viewer to apprehend. In Quarles’ words, ambiguity is ‘an excess of information’: more than one might be able to discern when forming an initial judgement. As in all her works, Quarles draws an analogy between the complexity of her visual field and her experience of being misread.
Now We're There (And We' Only Just Begun) is an ambitious installation that embraces improvisation and memory, as well as rigorous planning and study. The installation comprises spatial and historical considerations beyond the discrete boundaries of the canvas, as Quarles introduces new formal constraints and opportunities into her work, beyond the material and representative limits of traditional figurative painting.