
Magic Hour
2016
Magic Hour is a digital archival print on Moab Entrada 290 gsm paper that preserves a fresco Christina Quarles created during her residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in the summer of 2016. Because the original fresco no longer exists, this edition serves as the sole lasting record of that work, lending it a documentary significance that deepens its value beyond the print itself. Produced at a measured 71.1 by 55.9 centimeters, the work sits comfortably within an intimate scale that rewards close looking, the warm archival substrate lending a tactile warmth to the image that a canvas or coated paper could not provide. Quarles completed this piece at a formative moment in her career, before her subsequent rise to international prominence through major institutional exhibitions and acquisitions. Her practice centers on the fragmented, often indeterminate body, rendered through layered marks and compressed pictorial space in ways that resist fixed readings of identity, race, and gender. Magic Hour, situated within that framework, carries the urgency of a transitional gesture, something made quickly and physically in a communal environment, then translated into a form that could survive. The choice of title evokes the liminal light between day and dark, a fitting metaphor for the threshold quality that runs throughout her work. Signed by the artist, printed on a fine art paper with archival longevity, and representing a destroyed original, this work occupies a rare position within Quarles's output. Collectors acquiring her paintings at considerably higher price points will recognize the opportunity this print presents, offering direct access to her early thinking and visual language at a scale suited to a wide range of interiors. The edition ships from Florida, and the work is framed separately at the collector's discretion.
- Medium
- Digital archival print on Moab Entrada 290 gsm paper
- Sheet
- Signed
- Yes
- Spotted At
- Gallery · Artsy Auctions
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