Christina Quarles

Bottoms Up

The title of the painting Bottoms Up by Christina Quarles refers to the fact that the figure’s behind is raised upwards, and the face is found at the bottom of the painting, thus inverting the way in which people are typically seen. Bottom’s up is also a pun, a nod to the English toast. Quarles draws on several sources of inspiration, including comic book imagery, the influence of which sits alongside elements of her practice informed by life drawing classes. She begins a painting by making gestural marks which she then photographs before playing with the image on a computer. These gestures retain a muscle memory from her life-drawing practice, coalescing into a figure. She then experiments with different kinds of decorative grids and backgrounds before returning to paint the resulting image. In this painting, the artist refers to two different treatments of space, three dimensional on the right and flat or two dimensional on the left. The paint itself is highly textured in some places and flat in others. The decorative quality of the painting mimics, in some respects, cubist mark-making reminiscent of Picasso; there is a gravitational pull on both the image and the paint as the figure and paint are dragged down the canvas. The synthetic manner in which Quarles constructs the painting is belied by the overall painterly qualities.