Christina Quarles: In Likeness

Christina Quarles’s brilliant, bright, bendy, twisty, lumpy, bumpy paintings of bodies are coming to a major London institution, and about time. The American artist has shown at Pilar Corrias gallery before, and was included in the Whitechapel Gallery's figurative painting show, but this is her first major solo presentation and it promises to be seriously good. Quarles's figures bend and morph, painted with a wide variety of techniques and colours, defying easy categorisation, just like their creator: a queer woman born to a black father and white mother. So all those painterly ideas have conceptual reasoning, making for some beautiful, smart and hugely appealing contemporary painting.