Christina Quarles MFA ’16 at 59th Venice Biennale

Christina Quarles  is one of 5 Yale artists being featured at the 59th exhibition of the Venice Biennale. She received an M.F.A. from the Yale School of Art in 2016 and holds a B.A. from Hampshire College. Quarles was a 2016 participant at the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture. She paints bodies that are subjected not only to the weight and gravity of the physical world but also to the pleasures and pressures of the social realm. Her ambiguous and evocative scenes feature figures whose limbs, torsos, and faces collide and merge with familiar domestic objects made strange through her color choices and experimental painterly gestures. Her work explores the universal experience of existing within a body, as well as the ways race, gender, and sexuality intersect to form complex identities.

Quarles was the inaugural recipient of the 2019 Pérez Art Museum Miami Prize and in 2017 she received the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. In 2021 Quarles joined the board of trustees of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She lives and works in Los Angeles. 

Read more about Quarles and see some of her recent work at her website.

The 59th exhibition of the Venice Biennale opens April 23rd. On April 21st, the Yale Alumni Art League and the Yale School of Art will hold a reception and talk in celebration of alumni and faculty featured in the exhibition. Register here. 

For a full list of artists at the exhibition, visit here.