Silver Linings, Split Bodies: Standing Before Christina Quarles at the Stedelijk
Christina Quarles, Ev’ry Silver Lining Has its Cloud, 2024
Acrylic on canvas
Christina Quarles (b. 1985, Chicago - lives and works in Los Angeles)
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Tomorrow is a Different Day. Collection 1980-Now
Stepping into the room
To begin with, the room at the Stedelijk is almost bare, when you enter it: white walls, wooden floor, a measured quiet. On the right-hand wall, a single painting seems to be in the middle of slipping down the canvas. Limbs pour towards the bottom edge, paint follows, trailing into thin vertical drips that stop just above the real floor. Between the empty wall on the left and the dense knot of colour on the right, the whole space feels tilted, as if the painting were pulling the room slightly off balance.
You are in the collection presentation Tomorrow is a Different Day. Collection 1980-Now, an exhibition that brings together works, responding to the transformations of the last decades - globalisation, migration, decolonisation, digitisation, shifting ideas of identity.
Quarles’s Ev’ry Silver Lining Has its Cloud hangs here as one of those answers: not a slogan, but a question posed in paint.
A body made of contradictions
From a distance, the painting reads as a single, tangled figure, something like a body folding in on itself to stay on the canvas. As you move closer, the body refuses to stay singular. Hands and feet multiply, knees and shoulders stray into places where anatomy no longer applies. What looked like one body separates into at least two, then fuses back again. Elbows overlap, thighs split, fingers slip across planes that do not quite match.
Moving on to the next part, the lower half of the canvas, is where this drama happens. Flesh tones slide from lilac to bruised green, from warm ochre to sudden red. Shadows are not just dark but purple, blue, almost metallic. None of these colours aims at naturalism. Instead, they seem to register temperatures of feeling - irritation, tenderness, strain.
What is more, above this tangle, the painting opens into a quieter sky of cream and pale grey, interrupted only by a sharp triangle of blue and a few flat shapes. It is as if the bodies have sunk to the bottom of the frame, carrying the weight of the image, while the upper part stays light and barely drawn. Vertical stripes fall behind one of the figures like a curtain or a digital glitch, while a checked pattern wraps another limb in something between a blanket and a grid. These patterns feel like structures the bodies must live inside: textiles, architecture, perhaps even systems of classification.
Furthermore, up close, the surface reveals its own choreography. Thin graphic lines carve contours and fingertips and broad, soft brushstrokes melt colours together. Acrylic paint has been allowed to run in long drips, evidence of gravity and time. Some edges are crisp, as if taped. Others feather gently into the ground. The painting carries the marks of both control and letting go.
Lastly, Quarles’s practice is often described as an exploration of what it means to inhabit a body, whose identity is constantly misread - a Black, queer woman, whose appearance is frequently mistaken and whose experience is marked by ambiguity. Her canvases combine fragmented, polymorphous figures with dense patterns to question fixed ideas of race, gender and selfhood. Finally, in Ev’ry Silver Lining Has its Cloud, that questioning takes the form of bodies that never resolve into a single, stable image. They resist being turned into an easy picture of “who” is shown.
A title turned inside out
The title rewrites a familiar reassurance. Instead of “every cloud has a silver lining”, Quarles offers Ev’ry Silver Lining Has its Cloud. Hope and trouble trade places. What is usually promised as consolation, becomes something more complex: even our brightest moments carry histories of pain, doubt or vulnerability. Knowing this, the painting’s mood sharpens. The warm, almost intimate tangle of limbs no longer feels simply affectionate. It might be a scene of care, but also of pressure, dependence or exhaustion. The drips that slide toward the edge of the canvas become not just a stylistic choice, but a hint that this closeness could spill over that the scene is always on the verge of coming apart.
Quarles’s bodies often inhabit what she has called an “excess of representation” - too many limbs, too many angles, too many points of view at once. Here, that excess mirrors the double movement of the title: joy that isn’t pure, pain that isn’t the whole story either. The painting sits exactly in that in-between.
How the museum holds the work
The Stedelijk gives the painting room to breathe. It hangs on a wide white wall with generous empty space around it, the label placed modestly to the side. There is no bench to fix your distance, no barrier to keep you away. You decide, how close to stand, how long to stay. Moreover, light falls from above in a clear, even wash - typical of the light design that shapes the collection presentation. Nevertheless, there are no theatrical shadows, no coloured filters. The drama is left to the painting itself. The wooden floor reflects a soft echo of the canvas’s warmth, anchoring the work in the architecture. Because the wall around the painting is left blank, any neighbouring works recede from the view, when you stand in front of it. This isolation emphasizes the painting’s internal crowding: a single object surrounded by emptiness, filled with bodies that cannot find enough room for themselves. The display makes the painting feel like a small stage, where a private scene is unfolding in public.
Moving on to the next point, the label provides only the essential facts (artist, title, date, medium, collection) without prescribing a reading. In the context of Tomorrow is a Different Day, this restraint feels intentional. The broader exhibition texts speaks about artists, who respond to global and social shifts, challenging conventions and offering alternative perspectives on identity, power and belonging. Quarles’s painting fits naturally into this frame, but the museum allows the viewer to arrive at that connection themselves.
A body in front of other bodies
Standing before the painting, you become very aware of your own body. The contorted poses on the canvas make your shoulders tighten slightly, you tilt your head to follow the lines of an arm that seems to bend in three places at once. The more you look, the less certain you feel about, where one figure ends and the other begins. That uncertainty is not only visual - it seeps into how you think about identity. Nevertheless, you start at a distance, trying to map the composition. Then you step closer and find yourself caught in small details: the fine hatchings inside a knee, the thin red outline that suddenly hardens a curve, the way a pattern cuts through a thigh like a memory of another space. The painting refuses to be absorbed quickly, because every time you think you’ve located the figures, they slip again.
Other visitors move through the room at different speeds. Some glance, register a flash of strange limbs and walk on. Others stop, phones in hand, framing the painting as an image before approaching it as a body. A few lean in very close, tracing the boundaries between pattern and skin with their eyes. Watching them, you feel, how the painting choreographs not just its own figures, but the viewers as well, pulling people nearer, pushing them back, making them circle.
Reading the work through the exhibition’s lens
Tomorrow, the exhibition suggests, will not be a simple continuation of today. The works gathered here respond to decades marked by migration, decolonisation, digitisation, the visibility of previously marginalised voices. They show a world in flux, full of fractures and new connections.
Ev’ry Silver Lining Has its Cloud feels like a painterly version of that condition. The bodies it presents are neither singular nor stable. They are split, layered and doubled. They inhabit a space woven from patterns that could be textiles, screens or the invisible grids through which society reads and misreads our identities. The painting is not an illustration of a theory, but it shares the exhibition’s sense that identity today is lived “in-between”: between visibility and misrecognition, closeness and distance, hope and its shadow.
In this light, the inverted proverb of the title becomes more than a clever twist. It speaks to a contemporary realism, in which every gain in visibility can also expose one to new forms of scrutiny, every step towards freedom may carry the residue of old constraints. Quarles does not resolve this tension. Instead, she paints it - as a knot of limbs, a tangle of colours, a cluster of bodies that refuse to flatten into a single, reassuring image.
Leaving the room
When you finally turn away from the painting, the white wall beside it feels different: not empty, but resting. The room has become a kind of echo chamber for bodies - the painted ones, the other visitors’, your own.
Tomorrow may indeed be a different day, as the exhibition promises, but Quarles’s work suggests that difference is rarely pure. Silver linings drag their clouds behind them, clarity is streaked with ambiguity. In the quiet of the Stedelijk’s gallery, Ev’ry Silver Lining Has its Cloud does not offer comfort, but something more durable: an invitation to stay with that complexity a little longer and to recognize it in the way we move through our own bodies and through the rooms that try to hold them.
