Christina Quarles is dressed in dazzling lemon yellow as she tours the Gammel Strand art centre on the Frederiksholm Kanal in Copenhagen. A testament to Gammel Strand’s international ambitions, In the Shadow of Burning Light is the first solo exhibition in the Nordics for the Los Angeles-based Quarles, who is represented globally by galleries Hauser & Wirth and Pilar Corrias but is lesser known to a Danish audience.

Sinewy bodies, enveloped around one another, occupy Quarles’ paintings on the walls of the 18th-century townhouse, in which spindly limbs give way to sagging pieces of flesh. At times, these juxtapositions make no sense—a leg juts from a stomach, a breast floats through space, and a gaping mouth could be mistaken for a swollen orifice. One might view these scenes as carnal or torturous encounters, reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch’s feverish paintings. Are they moments of ecstasy or agony? They exude an otherworldly quality, like the exaggerated bodies of a Mannerist painting.

The American artist explains that her paintings capture how it feels to live within a particular body. They express the friction that occurs when we stray from the societal norms of race, gender and sexuality and feel the chafing of those limitations. A biracial, queer woman herself, Quarles is curious how these limitations can both stifle and bolster our sense of identity, as we stretch, censor and bruise ourselves to squeeze into space. It's fitting then that Quarles’ compositions have the feeling of a stage set, with an area for performance amidst a certain framework.

Quarles takes the idea of construction further at Gammel Strand, where the effect of the building’s historic features appears to manifest in her paintings. Through the summer, the intense Scandinavian light streams through the windows of the gallery and casts dramatic shadows on its walls. These harsh diagonals recur through Quarles’ paintings, upending the perspectival planes of pictures like Burden Of Yer Own Making (2023) and Lift Yew Up, I Wanna Lift Yew Up, I Wanna (2023), where a gingham blanket levitates from a black hole and sends an orgy of picnic-goers flying. 

Shadows slice through bodies in paintings like A Cherry Moon (Just As Tha Darkness Got Very Dark) (2023), whose prominent archway and figures on bended knee recall a medieval Annunciation scene. We might imagine these dividing lines between shadow and light to be the boundaries of identity that Quarles is drawn to. They also inspire the title of the exhibition: In the Shadow of Burning Light. For Quarles, titles often stem from pieces of conversations and pop lyrics, as in Underneath It All (2019), also the title of a 2001 song by No Doubt. Quarles harnesses the double entendre of these words to suggest the layers of her artistic practice and the experience of the figure being crushed beneath a translucent blue square, like a window frame.

The forms of Quarles' paintings are conjured through their making, beginning with a flurry of brushstrokes that might recall the stretch of a leg or the bend of an elbow. Before any figures are fixed, though, she purposefully transforms a limb into a rib, taking delight in upending our expectations of a painted mark. Quarles will, however, hold on to particular details that draw her into the canvas and remind her of a certain feeling or thought process. In Too Hot To Hoot (2023), we can imagine that the hook was the body under the pressure of intense heat. Drips run down the canvas like sweat and bodies seem to melt, lying beside a blue square filled with an undulating pattern that resembles a swimming pool, whose cooling waters could offer some relief.

The next step of her process is to photograph these initial marks and transfer them to a computer; Quarles uses Adobe Illustrator to play around with planes and patterns (a skill developed from her early career as a graphic designer). She then replicates the results by hand or through stencils that are placed on the canvas and later removed.

The works at Gammel Strand have a particular tendency towards stark contrasts – light and dark, pattern and colour, luscious and thin textures. These juxtapositions are emphasised by areas of raw canvas. Quarles was still an MFA student at Yale School of Art when she first became interested in the power of blank space (she graduated in 2016). She was intrigued by how these voids could be readily accepted in drawing and yet so debated in painting. A selection of Quarles’ drawings in ink on paper is on display at Gammel Strand. Smaller and more immediate than her paintings, the drawings are also often more light-hearted, as in Birthday Flowers (2023), which is set in Quarles’ kitchen. The drawings incorporate pieces of text – a technique Quarles once used in her paintings, but stopped when she found viewers were too eager to read these as descriptive captions. In fact, Quarles’ use of language is far from a narrative device.

It was when Quarles removed words from her paintings that pattern came to the fore. She viewed this as a very natural exchange - both language and pattern possess multiple meanings that can be peeled back in layers. At Gammel Strand, Quarles’ paintings are alive with colour and pattern, from the diamond design of a Harlequin costume to a field of flowers, checkers and woven threads.

Building upon the wallpaper effect of her landmark show at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (2023), Quarles has created a wallpaper, especially for Gammel Strand. The recurring starfish-like form is inspired by the remains of a flower stencil found in the studio, which has been photoshopped and turned lavender—a colour Quarles has grown particularly fond of recently. Once again, we find that the wallpaper cuts through the galleries, echoing the architectural features of Gammel Strand and the vivid contrast between shadow and burning light.

'In the Shadow of Burning Light' is on view at Gammel Strand, Copenhagen until September 8, 2024.