Christina Quarles

Christina Quarles was born in 1985 in Chicago, Illinois, and lives and works in Los Angeles with her wife. She earned a BA in Philosophy and Studio Art from Hampshire College in 2007, then an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art in 2016, the same year she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Her paintings and works on paper depict multiple, often entangled bodies rendered with shifting scale, perspective, and skin tone, a visual language she has connected to her own experience of being read differently depending on context and viewer. She gained wide attention through a run of institutional exhibitions in 2017 and 2018, including group shows at the New Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and LAXART, followed by a solo presentation as part of MATRIX 271 at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and inclusion in the Hammer Museum's Made in L.A. 2018 biennial. Solo exhibitions followed at The Hepworth Wakefield (2019 to 2020), the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2021), the Frye Art Museum (2022), and Kistefos Museum in Norway (2025). In February 2026 she opened her first exhibition with Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles, The Ground Glows Black, and in May 2026 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art opened an exhibition of her work, Now We're There (And We've Only Just Begun), in its galleries.

Quarles's critical reception has tracked closely with her exhibition history rather than with a single defining review. She received the inaugural Perez Prize from the Perez Art Museum Miami in 2019, following a 2017 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant and a 2015 Robert Schoelkopf Travel Fellowship from Yale. Her inclusion in group exhibitions addressing gender and identity, among them the New Museum's Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon in 2017, and her subsequent solo surveys at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and The Hepworth Wakefield, reflect a consistent institutional reading of her work as a significant contribution to contemporary figuration's engagement with race, gender, and queerness.

Quarles's auction market moved quickly. Her secondary-market debut came in 2018 at Phillips, where Pull On Thru Tha Nite (2017) sold for USD 255,000. Four years later, on 19 May 2022, her painting Night Fell Upon Us Up On Us (2019) sold for USD 4,527,000 at Sotheby's New Now evening sale in New York, a result reported alongside record-setting sales that same evening for Simone Leigh and Jennifer Packer. That remains her all-time auction high as of this writing. Artprice and MutualArt both record dozens of subsequent auction appearances for paintings and works on paper, indicating an active but still comparatively young secondary market.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Quarles's work, and her market is verified through her representing galleries, Hauser & Wirth and Pilar Corrias, rather than through an independent authentication body. Her auction record climbed sharply within a few years of her market debut, which is a pattern collectors should treat with some caution: rapid early appreciation in a young artist's market can be followed by wider swings than a more established market shows. Her strongest signal of durability is sustained museum acquisition and exhibition, including recent placements at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Tate, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.