Christina Quarles wants you to look at her work again and again, and then once more. Its colorful shapes can be assembled into bodies, though they appear figuratively only in broad strokes. Bright yellows, pinks, and reds applied in swift motions make them stand out against the more rigid background patterns. The figures connect: the larger one, on the right, turns its face back to the smaller one, who reaches out with both arms to touch it. It’s an intimate encounter, yet its exact nature remains elusive. A first glance suggests that the fingers on the forehead belong to the large figure, whose head is turned voluntarily, even in ecstasy. Looking again, we see how the figure screams in response to being jerked back, mouth open, eyes shut: “…From this Squeeze (Save Me, Save Me, Save Me).” But Quarles doesn’t want you to take the words of the title of her first TEXTE ZUR KUNST edition so literally. If the two figures enliven an interior like an odalisque in a Henri Matisse painting would, it might be the room’s dimensions that inhibit the large figure from unfurling its limbs. Is salvation needed from constricting circumstances? Or from the pressures Western art history exerts on the nude? Quarles has honed her skills in figure drawing over decades. But instead of squeezing bodies into the limited range of shapes available for the visual representation of the Other, she paints them as they experience themselves: as a fragmented whole. Quarles, who often notes that she is the daughter of a Black father and a white mother, saves her figures from binary classifications through that which art historian David J. Getsy has pointed to as a means of queer resistance: abstraction.